It sounds crazy to infuse radioactive substances into human body, but it predicates an effective technique to capture the “snapshot” of physiological functions of human body. That is the charm of nuclear medical imaging, which makes an interdisciplinary integration of nuclear technology, computing, chemistry, physics, biology and medicine for disease diagnosis and treatment, drug research and development and other purposes. In this field, the positron emission computed tomography (PET) is an advanced medical imaging technique which uses active particles to track diseases (cancers, neurodegenerative disorders, etc.).

Now the research group from the University of California is devoted to developing the first whole body PET scanner in the world which can realize the 3D imaging of the whole body. In their opinion, this more accurate, complete and sensitive imaging technique will help us further understand the organisms and monitor the real-time dynamic response of drugs, toxins and other substances in the organisms.

Last month, they published their first paper associated with this project on the Physics in Medicine and Biology and specified the early progress of this project. This week, Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi, the Principal Investigators and bioengineers of UC, published a paper on the journal of Science Translational Medicine and introduced the future application prospect of this instrument.

The research group named this instrument as EXPLORER (EXtreme Performance LOng REsearch scanneR), looking forward to applying it in the clinical settings in 2018.