Congratulations to Levent Sensoy for successfully defending his PhD dissertation on "GeO-PET: A Novel 4π Geometry Organ - PET for Small Animals."

"Dr. Levent Sensoy designed and constructed a novel, compact, specimen-specific positron emission tomography (PET) imaging device that is significantly more cost effective than the existing state-of-the-art systems while providing spatial resolution appropriate for ex-vivo small animal tissue and organ studies. The PET scanner is a four-face parallel-plate PET scanner based on SiPM detectors, which are coupled with 2 mm thick LYSO crystals. Levent performed a Monte Carlo simulation of this scanner to validate and analyze its properties in various settings. Using extensive analysis of both real and simulation data he characterized the performance of the scanner, which has 1.25 mm spatial resolution around the center and 1.50 mm spatial resolution at the periphery of the FoV using small pixelated LYSO crystals, with evidence for higher resolution using monolithic LYSO crystals. Using simulations he demonstrate improvements to image quality associated with increased angular sampling through rotation of the detector system and explore the possibility of enhancing increasing scanner sensitivity through implementation of a six-faced fully enclosed geometry."
— John Sunderland, PhD advisor

Dr. Sensoy has accepted a post-doctoral position in the lab of Simon Cherry, PhD, at the University of California, Davis.