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Orlando, USA
- As leader of the European Union funded HYPERImage research project, Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) today announced that the project has achieved a major milestone in its ambitious plan to create a new medical imaging technique called hybrid PET/MR. This new technique is based on the simultaneous acquisition of
time-of-flight Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Magnetic Resonance (MR) images.
The project involves eight partners from six European countries and has
a total budget of around EUR 7 million. The ultimate
goals of the project are to advance the accuracy of
diagnostic imaging in cardiology and oncology and
open up new fields in therapy planning, guidance and
response monitoring.
A hybrid PET/MR scanner could simultaneously deliver
the anatomical and functional information achievable
using state-of-the-art MR scanners (e.g. soft tissue
contrast and physiological processes in blood
vessels) and the molecular imaging information
provided by PET. As a result, it would combine the
best of both worlds, which could ultimately help to
pinpoint and characterize disease sites within the
body more accurately than is currently possible.
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Picture of the PET detector stack for the preclinical PET/MR
test system.
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For a hybrid scanner that offers simultaneous PET
and MR image acquisition, two fundamental problems
need to be solved: the development of MR-compatible
PET detectors and a method of accounting for PET
attenuation (the scattering of high-energy gamma
rays generated by the PET tracers by parts of the
human body).
The milestone that the HYPERImage team has reached
is the development of a functional gamma-ray
detector that meets the performance requirements of
the latest time-of-flight PET scanners. The
new gamma-ray detectors have been designed to be
compatible with the strong static and dynamic
magnetic fields that would be present in a combined
PET/MR scanner. Furthermore, the team has achieved
major progress with respect to MRI-based static and
dynamic PET attenuation correction. Details of these
results are presented at the IEEE Nuclear Science
Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference, which
takes place on October 25-31 in Orlando, Florida,
USA.
“Understanding the molecular mechanisms associated
with cardiovascular disease and cancer, and the
development of technologies focused on the early
detection of these disease processes are the two
main challenges of biomedical research,” said Prof.
Dr. Valentin Fuster, Director of the National Center
for Cardiovascular Research in Madrid (one of
Europe’s leading research centers in cardiology) and
the Cardiovascular Institute at the Mount Sinai
Medical Center in New York. “I am convinced that the
realization of a PET/MR technology platform will
significantly help to improve the precision and the
moment at which disease is diagnosed, two critical
parameters for the successful treatment of many
diseases.”
“The HYPERImage team’s combined expertise in
semiconductor physics, signal processing and medical
scanner design, together with its expert clinical
knowledge, have moved the project an important step
forward in the development of a new imaging tool
that is intended to help clinicians diagnose and
treat some of the world’s most prevalent killer
diseases, such as breast cancer,” says Henk van
Houten, senior vice president of Philips Research
and head of Philips’ healthcare research program. “I
am proud to say that proof-of-concept of an
MR-compatible PET detector took the team less than
1.5 years to achieve. It clearly demonstrates that
good collaborations lead to very fast progress.”
The HYPERImage consortium comprises three
universities (King's College London, UK; Universität
Heidelberg, Germany; and Universiteit Ghent -
Institute for Broadband Technology, Belgium), three
research foundations (Fundación Centro Nacional de
Investigaciones Cardiovasculares, Spain; Fondazione
Bruno Kessler, Italy; and The Netherlands Cancer
Institute, The Netherlands), a university medical
center (Uniklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany) and
the industrial partner (Philips, The Netherlands and
Germany).
EU funding for the HYPERImage project, which is
being provided as part of the EU’s 7th Framework
Program, amounts to around EUR 5 million. The
consortium partners will provide an additional EUR
2.3 million. The project started in 2008 and will
run for three years. Philips’ leadership of the
consortium is based on its experience in designing
and developing medical scanners.
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