The past and current successes of nuclear medical metabolic imaging in clinical and basic studies encourage the research community to constantly push the limits of scanner systems, for example in positron emission tomography (PET). As with microelectronics, the miniaturization of radiation detectors is approaching or reaching some of the fundamental limits of PET. Other strategies must therefore be put forward to improve the quality of its images. One approach is to measure the time of flight of particles, where achieving sub-10 ps accuracy promises remarkable benefits in image quality.
