Interest of TOF PET for clinical applications

The interest of PET is now well established in medical research. Recently PET has proved to be also useful in the clinical domain e.g. for the diagnosis of epilepsy, myocardial disease etc... Its use has been so far limited by the cost of the radionuclide production and the cost of the PET itself. However, inexpensive, compact cyclotrons and centralized distribution of F18 are beginning to facilitate the availability of radionuclides. Thanks to its performances in terms of high random rate, sensitivity gain, random reduction, TOF is becoming practical for clinical use, especially with new types of architecture allowing the reduction of the cost of the detection head, so far the main obstacle to the use of TOF PET in clinical domain.