Michel M. Ter‑Pogossian (1925–1996): a pioneer of positron emission tomography weighted in fast imaging and Oxygen‑15 application

Michel M. Ter-Pogossian (Fig. 1) was a great pioneer in the field of nuclear medicine. His achievements include the development and medical use of the cyclotron, realization of a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner, time-of-flight (TOF) implementation in PET, and clinical use of Oxygen-15 (15O) tracers.He was born on April 21, 1925. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Paris University, France, and received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the Washington University, St. Louis. He joined the faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine in 1950 as an instructor, and from 1961, he held a professorship in Radiation Physics and Physiology. He was also director of Mallinckrodt Institute’s Division of Radiation Sciences from 1963 to 1991. He was the first editor of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. Unfortunately, on June 19, 1996, he suddenly died in Paris due to a heart attack; he was 71 years old. We believe that, if Ter-Pogossian had lived another 10 years, he would have won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to innovation in PET.He received many awards for his pioneering work related to the medical use of the cyclotron, 15O tracer study, its kinetic analysis, and PET system development. These many honors were an expression of his ability to collaborate with many other experts from different disciplines, both as a leader and as a team player. His scientific accomplishments were based on his endless motivation for understanding biology and medicine. He published a textbook on diagnostic radiology as a summary of his early carrier in 1967, which has been recognized as the first textbook in the field of diagnostic radiology physics [1]. From him, we can learn that achievements in nuclear medicine require inputs of many specialists, such as physicians, physicists, engineers, physiologists, chemists, computer scientists, and other philosophies of nature