Miniature, Wearable PET Scanner

Scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University, and other collaborators have demonstrated the efficacy of a wearable, portable PET scanner they've developed for rats. The device will give neuroscientists a new tool for simultaneously studying brain function and behavior in fully awake, moving animals.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] my name is Paul Vasa I'm a scientist in the medical Department the rat is a very important model in medical research pet is used with rats quite a bit these days however the rat has to be anesthetized to do the scan however the anesthesia disrupts the normal brain function so when you're looking at brain studies this is a big

00:00:27 problem but it's the only way that people could do pet scans on the rat model what we did was we miniaturized the pet scanner so small that we can actually attach it to the rat's head and this is the actual scanner that we built inside here there's actually 12 Pet Block detectors with 32 crystals each there's about 400 separate pet crystals in this ring everything's been

00:00:46 miniaturized to the point that all the connections come out on this single flexible fiber there's high voltage going in there's power going in there's signals coming out so this flexible connection and the compact Electronics inside there allows the animal to move freely within the enclosure this can give us not only better information about the brain because the

00:01:04 anesthesia is no longer there which can potentially corrupt the data that we're getting but it also allows us to measure the behavior of the animal at the same time that we're getting the brain data there's a whole field of Neuroscience called behavioral Neuroscience where people only look at the behavior of the rat in order to infer the function of the brain this allows us to actually

00:01:23 look at physical processes in the brain at the same time so there's a lot of excitement about being able to correlate these two different data sets to learn uh potentially much more about the brain