Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging has proven to be a useful tool in diagnosing cancer and cardiac diseases and has an increasingly important role in providing earlier diagnosis in several disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. PET studies evaluate the metabolism of a particular organ or tissue by using radioactive tracers made by attaching a radioactive atom to chemical substances that are naturally used by the particular organ or tissue during its metabolic process. This way. information about the functionality and anatomy of the organ or tissue is evaluated, as well as its biochemical properties. Thus, PET may detect biochemical changes in an organ or tissue that can identify the onset of a disease process before anatomical changes related to the disease can be seen with other imaging modalities. The radioactive tracer is administered into the patient before the PET scan. The measurement of the radioactive tracer concentration in blood, the input function (IF), is a necessary input for PET kinetic modelling to quantify tissue function. The IF is usually derived from multiple blood samples drawn from an arterial cannula and processed to obtain the radioactive tracer concentration in plasma. Unfortunately, the invasive withdrawal of arterial blood is a significant discomfort to the patient. The goal of this project is to develop and optimize a non-invasive, wrist detector that will be placed on the wrist of the patient, and subsequently measure the arterial IF through detection of passing emitted positrons.