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University of Virginia Patent Foundation

Stuart S Berr

JosE Maria Benlloch Baviera

Antonio Javier Gonzalez Martinez

Stanislaw Majewski

Vu Minh Mai

A positron emission tomography (PET) assembly includes an annular housing and an annular scintillator disposed within the annular housing. The annular scintillator includes an annular, substantially continuous crystal scintillator tube configured to absorb ionizing radiation and to emit light energy. A plurality of photo detectors are annularly disposed around the annular scintillator within the annular housing and configured to detect the emitted light energy.

Positron emission tomography systems and methods

A magnetic resonance technique to measure perfusion of fluid to tissue by inverting all the spins in fluid water hydrogen nuclei of the subject with a non-spatially-selective radiofrequency (RF) pulse and immediately reinverting the spins in an imaging plane of interest such that the spins in the imaging plane experience minimal perturbation of their magnetization while the spins outside the plane (extraslice) are inverted (tagged). To account for signal loss effects of magnetization transfer (MT), a control image is obtained by applying two non-selective inversion pulses and creating a perfusion-weighted image by subtracting the tagged image from the control image. When this tagged image is subtracted from a &ldquo;control&rdquo; image, the resulting intensity arises solely from the tagged spins that have flowed into the imaging plane. This resultant image is referred to as a perfusion weighted image, because its intensity is a function of the rate of perfusion into the imaging plane. The intensity is also a function of the relaxation rate of the inflowing spins, the partition coefficient of the spins, and the relaxation rate of the stationary tissue. Estimates on these values can be made and can be used to calculate a perfusion map, which is an image that is created in which the intensity of each voxel is proportional to the perfusion of spins into the voxel. EST MRI is entirely noninvasive and overcomes some of the problems associated with the other noninvasive MRI techniques.

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Crozet, VA, United States of America

Stuart S Berr