Positron Emission Tomography with Liquid Argon Detection

Advances in utilizing Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) for low-energy particle detection create an opportunity for their application in the medical physics community. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners are a critical tool for doctors when diagnosing a patient and creating a treatment plan for a variety of harmful diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease. The low-energy particle identification capabilities and scalability of LArTPCs, now demonstrated by several neutrino physics experiments, could provide greater accuracy and resolution when detecting 511 keV gamma rays utilized in PET scans. This detector technology can also be scaled up to sizes that would enable full-body PET scans to be performed. This presentation will describe our efforts to construct a prototype LArTPC featuring a pixelated anode and VUV light sensors and expose it to a radioactive source (Na-22), allowing the response of the detector to 511 keV gammas to be studied. Preliminary results from this prototype will be presented, and future directions involving larger-scale detectors will be discussed.