%0 Journal Article %A Simon R. Cherry %A Terry Jones %A Joel S. Karp %A Jinyi Qi %A William Moses %A Ramsey Badawi %T TOTAL-BODY PET: MAXIMIZING SENSITIVITY TO CREATE NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR CLINICAL RESEARCH AND PATIENT CARE %D 2017 %R 10.2967/jnumed.116.184028 %J Journal of Nuclear Medicine %P jnumed.116.184028 %X Positron emission tomography (PET) is widely considered as the most sensitive technique available for non-invasively studying physiology, metabolism and molecular pathways in the living human being. However, the utility of PET, being a photon deficient modality, remains constrained by factors including low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), long imaging times and concerns regarding radiation dose. Two developments offer the potential to dramatically increase the effective sensitivity of PET. First by increasing the geometric coverage to encompass the entire body, sensitivity can be increased by a factor of ~40 for total-body imaging or a factor of ~4-5 for imaging a single organ such as the brain or heart. The world’s first total-body PET/computerized tomography (CT) scanner is currently under construction to demonstrate how this step change in sensitivity impacts the way PET is utilized both in clinical research and patient care. Second, there is the future prospect of significant improvements in timing resolution that could lead to further effective sensitivity gains. When combined with total-body PET, this could produce overall sensitivity gains of more than two orders of magnitude compared to existing state-of-the-art systems. In this article we discuss the benefits of increasing body coverage, describe our efforts to develop a first-generation total-body PET/CT scanner, discuss selected application areas for total-body PET and project the impact of further improvements in time-of-flight (TOF) PET. %U https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/jnumed/early/2017/09/21/jnumed.116.184028.full.pdf