Tech Craft
Core Components
The World's Smallest Medical Crystal Units
The World's Smallest Medical Crystal Units
The crystal is the smallest but most important unit in PET-CT. As the core component of the photoconductive detector system, it directly determines the performance and image quality of the whole machine.
Dec 22, 2021
Dec 22, 2021
How Can We Reduce Crystal Size?
PET detectors with smaller crystals can improve the pixel accuracy of the system and the resolution of images. But how to reduce crystal size has been a bottleneck in electronics for decades and has hindered the development of the whole nuclear medicine industry.
For example, the medical crystal manufacturing supply chain is becoming more mature, and abruptly carrying out process transformation brings immeasurable cost risks. There are more than tens of thousands of crystals in a PET/CT scanner. The raw material rare-earth elements are more valuable than gold, while flickering crystals have a long growing period together with a high breakage rate. In addition, the crystal manufacturing process is complicated and directly affects the performance of PET scanner. A small change may affect the whole system. There is no precedent for how to solve this system design problem. Above all, the industry has largely failed to develop crystals that are smaller and more precise than the commonly used 4-6mm crystals.
Innovation Is Our DNA
At United Imaging Healthcare, innovation is routine, which lies in every detail and interconnect one after another. After having revolutionizing electronics, a series of innovations on the core technology of PET-CT came out in a raw way: subverting the structure of traditional detectors, an integrated light guide design that greatly improves light collection efficiency, seamless splicing technology that realizes full photon capture, and greatly improved the reconstruction technology of image signal-to-noise ratio... The rollout of a series of achievements has laid a solid foundation for the our further development in molecular imaging domain.