TOPEM: A PET-TOF endorectal probe, compatible with MRI for diagnosis and follow up of prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is the most common disease in men and the second leading cause of cancer death. Generic large instruments for diagnosis have sensitivity, spatial resolution, and contrast inferior with respect to dedicated prostate imagers. Multimodality imaging can play a significant role merging anatomical and functional details coming from simultaneous PET and MRI. The TOPEM project has the goal of designing, building, and testing an endorectal PET-TOF MRI probe. The performance is dominated by the detector close to the source. Results from simulation show spatial resolution of ~1.5 mm for source distances up to 80 mm. The efficiency is significantly improved with respect to the external PET. Mini-detectors have been built and tested. We obtained, for the first time, to our best knowledge, timing resolution of o400 ps and at the same time Depth Of Interaction (DOI) resolution of 1 mm or less. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.