Differences in System Quality Control between Conventional and Next Generation digital PET/CT for Technologists

2679 Objectives The learning objectives are: 1. Introduction to digital PET (dPET) with a brief technology overview, describing what has changed as compared to conventional PET systems with a focus on system quality control 2. Review of daily and monthly QC procedures on a dPET system and observations 3. Observed improvements in daily workflow as related to technology and automation advances for the QC process Methods We have been operating a next generation, solid state, digital photon counting PET/CT in a pre-commercial release version for clinical and pre-clinical trials for more than one year. As the detectors have changed from the conventional photomultiplier tubes (480) to now more than 20,000 discrete digital photon counting units (DPCU), many aspects are fundamentally quite different for quality control. Another major difference is that on the new system, the detectors are directly and fully climate controlled independent of room temperature. We have tracked our experience with the daily and monthly QC processes involved with the next generation dPET system. Working with the vendor, we have carefully tracked numerous aspects of the QC process, such as time required to run daily PET QC, the accuracy of the automated CT QC, and we have reported back areas for improvement in the QC procedure prior to commercial release of the system. We will describe in detail all these aspects, as related to the daily operation of the system by a nuclear medicine technologist. Results Long term monitoring of the daily QC procedures for the dPET system has shown outstanding stability and consistency of the pre-commercial release system. The time to complete the daily QC has been more than halved as compared to our comparator conventional PET system. This leads to improvements in daily workflow in a busy clinical environment. It also allows for improved workflow in cases of system shutdown or restarting. We have seen that the entire reboot to back up and acquisition ready is within half an hour. Conclusions Among the many potential benefits with the evolution to next generation digital PET/CT imaging, the improvements in the daily and monthly QC techniques offer the capability to enhance the workflow for operation of the system within any clinical environment. We will describe these advances and opportunities in detail, from the perspective of the operating technologists. The next generation system promise improve stability, faster and better supported quality control all helping with improvements in workflow efficiencies.