Siemens Healthineers unveiled its new Biograph Vision PET/CT system at this week's European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) congress in Vienna.
Also at EANM 2017, Siemens debuted new software for Biograph Vision, as well as the Biograph mCT and Biograph mCT Flow PET/CT systems.
Biograph Vision is designed for time-of-flight (TOF) performance with 249-picosecond temporal resolution using small 3.2-mm lutetium oxyorthosilicate (LSO) crystals. It features Siemens' new Optiso ultradynamic range detector technology, which is based on silicon photomultipliers rather than the photomultiplier tubes that have been the industry standard. The technology reduces the size of the detector's LSO crystal elements from 4 x 4 mm to 3.2 x 3.2 mm, meaning higher spatial resolution, which may improve lesion detectability.
Biograph Vision also has a 78-cm bore that offers 24% more space than the industry standard, according to the company. It's designed for improved patient comfort and positioning, as well as advanced applications in radiation therapy (RT) planning.
The scanner's new software features QualityGuard, which self-calibrates the PET detector by tapping natural background radiation from the LSO detectors to run daily and weekly quality control procedures during off-hours, saving up to 30 minutes of staff time per day.
The FlowMotion Multiparametric Suite delivers whole-body PET images of tracer uptake rate and distribution volume, in addition to the standard static PET images. Another feature, OncoFreeze, provides images almost entirely free of respiratory motion. It uses 100% of acquired information from the respiratory cycle and potentially allows for reduced acquisition time.
CardioFreeze addresses issues associated with cardiac PET/CT image acquisitions, correcting respiratory and cardiac motion. With CardioFreeze, each individual cardiac gate is reconstructed with 100% of the data acquired, eliminating variability from respiratory and heartbeat motion.
The OncoFreeze, CardioFreeze, QualityGuard, and FlowMotion Multiparametric Suite are currently in development and do not yet fulfill all the essential requirements according to the European Medical Device Directive (93/42/EEC) and its national implementations, Siemens said. They are not yet commercially available in the European Union, or available for sale in the U.S. or any other country.
In addition, the Biograph Vision PET/CT is not for sale yet in France or the U.S.
