On the way to the 10 ps time-of-flight PET challenge

There is a consensus for gathering the multidisciplinary academic and industrial medical imaging community around the ambitious challenge to develop a 10 ps Time-of-Flight PET scanner (TOFPET). The goal is to reduce the radiation dose (currently 5–25 mSv for whole-body PET/CT) and/or scan time (currently > 10 min) by an order of magnitude, with a significant gain in the patient comfort and cost per exam (currently in the range of 1000 € per scan). To achieve this very ambitious goal it is essential to significantly improve the performance of each component of the detection chain: light production, light transport, photodetection, readout electronics. Speeding up progress in this direction is the goal of the challenge and will have an important impact on the development of a new generation of ionization radiation detectors. The possibility to reach 10 ps time-of-flight resolution at small energies (511 keV), as required in finely granulated calorimeters and PET scanners, although extremely challenging, is not limited by physical barriers and a number of disruptive technologies, such as multifunctional heterostructures, combining the high stopping power of well-known scintillators with the ultrafast photon emission resulting from the 1D, 2D or 3D quantum confinement of the excitons in nanocrystals, photonic crystals, photonic fibers, as well as new concepts of 3D digital SiPM structures, open the way to new radiation detector concepts with unprecedented performance.