Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Quantitative Functional Imaging
with Positron Emission Tomography:
Principles and Instrumentation
Koon-Pong Wong 1
2.1 Introduction
The last few decades of the twentieth century have witnessed significant ad-
vances in medical imaging, which had been exclusively concerned with conven-
tional film/screen X-ray imaging for more than 75 years after the discovery of
X-ray by Wilhelm R ontgen in 1895. In particular, when Allen Cormack and God-
frey Hounsfield introduced X-ray computed tomography (CT) independently in
the early 1970s [1-3] based on the mathematical foundation laid by Radon [4]
for reconstructing images of an object from its projections, the field of medi-
cal imaging was revolutionized. Imaging with X-ray CT has enabled us to view
noninvasively, for the first time, the anatomic structure of internal organs with
unprecedented precision and to recognize any gross pathology of organs and dis-
eases. This also marked a new era of medical diagnostics with many invasive and
potentially morbid procedures being substituted by noninvasive cross-sectional
imaging.
The breakthrough development of X-ray CT was made possible by contin-
uing advances in instrumentation and computer technologies, which also ac-
celerated the development of other multi-dimensional imaging modalities that
possess a great potential for providing, in addition to morphologic (structural)
1 Department
of
Electronic
and
Information
Engineering,
Hong
Kong
Polytechnic
University Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong
57
 
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