Building A Better Pre-Clinical PET Imaging System

This Apple Science podcast features Professor Tom Lewellen in the Department of Radiology’s Nuclear Medicine Division at the University of Washington. He and his team are designing Mac-based imaging systems that give investigators a closer look at metabolic functions in a mouse that weighs about an ounce. The primary design goal of these pre-clinical research tools is higher resolution images. The ultimate goals are better understanding of disease, more effective therapy, and better outcomes from patient care. The Physics Group is tasked with providing the Department of Radiology with superior imaging tools. The technology used in their development workflow includes 15 MacBook Pro and six iMac systems to design circuit boards, write code, and simulate scanner systems under development. They run simulations on an eight-core Apple Xserve cluster with seven terabytes of RAID storage. An 8-core Mac Pro with two Apple Cinema Displays is used exclusively for viewing scanner images with OsiriX, an open-source, Mac-only, DICOM viewer. No technology out there could give them the kind of resolution they need. So they use the Mac to design, build and run positron emission tomography – or PET - scanners that push the resolution envelope. Off-the-shelf hardware components couldn’t provide the performance they need, so they started from scratch, using the Mac to design hardware and write code. Asked why we they like the Mac better, their answer is that it’s easier to use.