Compact PET Scanner Adapts to Existing MRI Systems

A novel positron emission tomography (PET) scanner enables simultaneous molecular and functional imaging in existing third-party magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems.

The NuPET in-bore PET scanner inserts into existing MRI instruments to create a powerful and flexible hybrid preclinical imaging platform that combines the superior anatomical, structural, and functional information of MRI with the molecular sensitivity of PET, allowing researchers to simultaneously capture time-synchronized and highly complementary information. The PET/MRI combination aids in the measurement of multiple physiological processes with tissue contrast, quantitative accuracy, and study throughput.

The NuPET scanner can be quickly inserted and removed, making integration into any high throughput MRI facility easy. Other features include support of powerful small animal gradients in a wide range of MRI systems at various field strengths; high spatial resolution and sensitivity; automatic PET/MRI co-registration; intuitive acquisition and reconstruction software; and a stand-alone PET imaging option for maximum flexibility and utilization. The NuPET scanner is a product of Cubresa (Winnipeg, Canada), and has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“The NuPET system will provide scientists with the ability to monitor structural, functional, and molecular changes under identical physiological conditions, since changes are observed at the same time,” said George Abe, CEO of Cubresa. “This gives scientists confidence when evaluating multi-modal data, and could potentially reduce the number of animals required to reach scientific conclusions.”

“Simultaneous PET/MRI lets us discover new relationships between functional and molecular processes during development of new drugs and disease diagnostics,” said Steven Beyea, PhD, of the Biomedical Translational Imaging Centre (BIOTIC) at the Izaak Walton Killam Health Centre (Halifax, Canada). “An example is that with our NuPET system, we can now correlate metabolic and vascular changes due to cancer, which will enable us to understand the impact of novel therapeutics.”

Simultaneous PET/MRI imaging offers a solution to many challenges that face researchers who wish to correlate biochemical and physiological changes in their subjects.

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