Quantum Entanglement Tomography for enhanced medical imaging

This project will enable the commercialisation of a new concept for positron imaging which utilises quantum entanglement - Quantum Entanglement Tomography (QET). The work will fund a new collaboration between the University of Edinburgh (UoE) and Kromek, one of the leading UK based manufacturers of particle detector products. The new collaboration has the potential to enable new high-quality and low-cost PET imaging detectors.

In PET imaging a patient is injected with sugar containing a radioactive atom, usually a flourine atom. When this atom decays 2 photons are emitted which come out in opposite directions back-to-back. By detecting many of these 2 photon events an image of the source can be reconstucted. PET imaging is used for many important clinical diagnoses such as identifying cancerous tissue and diagnosing Alzheimer's disease.

We (UoE) have developed and patented a new technique (QET) which will improve upon the sharpness and contrast of the PET image using quantum information. There will be significant cost benefits in adopting this approach. Better imaging will lead to more appropriate treatment, resulting in fewer futile surgical interventions and improved therapy choices for the increasingly expensive chemotherapies applied by oncologists. Apart from oncology applications, there is an increasing use of PET imaging in neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. This technical developments in this project would allow smaller and weaker clinical features to be seen, permitting earlier and more reliable diagnosis of disease and disease progression.

The new quantum-information based medical imaging method will be commercialised with the CZT based detector systems developed by Kromek. These state-of-the-art photon detectors have close to ideal detection characteristics to accurately determine and exploit this quantum information.

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging is currently the fastest growing modality of medical imaging in both the US and Europe, with the number of patients using PET scans increasing by 21% per year between 2005 and 2010. To meet this growing demand, worldwide sales of PET scanners are expected to increase from $781M in 2010 to $1.7B by 2018. Three of the targeted areas for improvements of PET scanners are improved image quality, reduced scanning times and reduced radiation dose to the patient. We propose a technique based on QET, utilising the quantum entanglement of the two photons. Our solution provides a novel method with increased signal:noise ratio over PET, proving a method to improve the image quality in reduced time and dose. A feasibility study by UoE has proved the concept of the technology, and led to an initial patent. The work also evaluated performance criteria which any detection system would need to meet to create a commercial system. Kromek's cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) semiconductor detectors are the current leading detector technology to achieve this and commercialise the new method. The collaboration between Kromek and UoE has the potential to create new technology and analysis methods which will lead to higher quality and lower cost PET scanners.

The improved imaging capabilities will lead to better diagnosis, including smaller cancers being detected, lower false alarms, better localisation for planning. These will lead to reduced misdiagnosis and follow-up costs, reduced treatment costs (e.g. diagnosis of breast cancer, before they present symptomatically can reduce treatment costs by 20-40%), reduced anxiety and increased health. The radiation dose required for a QET scan will be smaller than PET, giving health and environmental benefits (with lower amounts of radiotracer production required). This reduction can also lead to faster scan times, opening up new functional scanning possibilities for the technique.