Cyclotron

The facility housing UT Southwestern Medical Center's Cyclotron and Radiochemistry Program features a state-of-the-art General Electric PETtrace 880 cyclotron. The cyclotron can produce both conventional and unconventional isotopes (¹⁵O, ¹³N, ¹¹C, ¹⁸F; ⁶⁴Cu, ⁸⁶Y, and ⁸⁹Zr) for clinical and preclinical research with PET on campus. With the maximum proton beam current of 130 μA at 16.5 MeV, the cyclotron is capable of both proton and deuteron dual beams.

PET/CT

In January 2020, the Department of Radiology installed a GE Discovery IQ five ring PET/CT dedicated to research in the NE2 building, in close proximity to our cyclotron facility. This state-of-the-art digital time-of-flight (TOF) PET/CT scanner provides a 26 cm axial field of view with the highest noise equivalent count rate (NECR) of the commercially available PET/CT scanners. This scanner has very high NEMA sensitivity (266 kcps), which can be exploited to either reduce the dose of radiotracer employed or the image acquisition time. The five-ring system was chosen because its coverage facilitates whole body PET/CT studies by reducing the number of bed positions required. It has both respiratory and cardiac gating capabilities. The CT scanner component is 128 slice Revolution Evo. A dedicated software package (Dynamic Vue) for quantitative analysis of PET data, including 4D PET datasets, is available.

PET/MR

In 2021, the Department of Radiology purchased a Siemens 3T Biograph mMR scanner. The scanner is capable of simultaneous MRI and PET imaging and is the only one of its type in the North Texas Region. It is a 3 Tesla MRI system with a 60 cm short bore diameter, 50 cm FOV, 45 mT/m gradients @ 200 T/m/s with up to 9 um resolution and zero helium boil-off technology. It has an actively shielded whole-body gradient coil system providing state-of-the-art spatial and temporal resolution. It has full neurofunctional, cardiac, musculoskeletal and body MR imaging capabilities including structural, blood flow, vascular structures, oncologic applications, and metabolic PET. Tim optimized MR coils and the mMR Tim table improve consistency of PET imaging and minimize attenuation of PET signal. The integrated PET has an axial FOV of 25.8 cm, transaxial FOV of 59.4 cm centered on the MRI isocenter providing true simultaneous MRI and PET imaging. The fully-integrated PET detectors use APD technology and LSO crystals (eight rings with 56 detectors blocks per ring, each consisting of 8×8 arrays of 4×4×20 mm3 crystals read out by a 3×3 array of APDs). Reconstructed transverse spatial resolution is 4.3-5.2 mm (FWHM). The scanner is used for both pediatric and adult clinical and research applications with dedicated pediatric MRI-conditional anesthesia available.

Small Animal PET/CT

The Siemens Inveon PET/CT Multimodality System (NE3.116) is a small animal PET/CT imaging scanner built on the Siemens Inveon acquisition architecture, which fully integrates PET and CT into a common data acquisition system for automatic transition between modes and seamless coordination of CT and PET data acquisition.