Digital PET Systems

In the past decades, the main development in positron emission tomography (PET) technology has been detector design, specifically the adoption of solid-state technology. Conventional photomultiplier tubes have been replaced by compact detector elements commonly referred to as silicon-photomultipliers (SiPMs). At present, there are three commercially available PET/CT systems equipped with SiPM-based detectors. These so-called “digital” PET/CT systems are the Philips Vereos PET/CT (Philips Healthcare), the Siemens Biograph Vision PET/CT (Siemens Healthineers), and the GE Discovery MI PET/CT (General Electric Healthcare).This chapter on digital PET describes the technical principles regarding digital PET/CT systems, summarizes the performance characteristics for the three different systems, and reports on the resulting image quality, lesion detectability, and possibilities to reduce scan duration and/or lower the amount of 18F-FDG activity administration