Weill Cornell Medicine researchers have secured a $6.2 million, five-year grant from the NIH's National Institute on Aging to develop a portable PET scanner designed for detecting early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

The device will allow patients to sit upright in a movable chair, according to a report in the Cornell Chronicle, increasing accessibility and ease of use for medical facilities without advanced imaging resources.

The team, led by Amir H. Goldan, associate professor of electrical engineering in radiology, aims to build on a previous proof-of-concept study that demonstrated the capabilities of their Prism-PET scanner, which achieved groundbreaking image resolution. In lab tests, Prism-PET detected “hot spots” less than 1 mm in diameter, surpassing the resolution of current commercial PET scanners.
"We have previously simulated the performance of our high-resolution Prism-PET brain scanner and showed substantially more accurate delimitation and radiotracer uptake quantification of small brain structures such as the RN and LC when compared to the state-of-the-art whole-body Siemens Biograph Vision and total-body EXPLORER PET scanners," the researchers wrote in 2023.

The new project will focus on identifying tau tangles in the transentorhinal cortex, a small brain area linked to memory and navigation and an early indicator of Alzheimer’s.

Dr. Gloria Chiang, director of the Brain Health Imaging Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-lead on the project, emphasized the importance of targeting this region, which is challenging to image with conventional PET technology, even when using specialized tau tracers. Improved motion compensation techniques will also be developed to reduce image blurring caused by patient movement, a frequent challenge in brain imaging.

Given the 2023 FDA approval of lecanemab, a treatment for Alzheimer’s targeting amyloid plaques, the demand for PET imaging has surged. Goldan aims to make the high-performance brain scanner accessible to more healthcare facilities, noting that a compact, mobile PET scanner could bring brain imaging to community hospitals or even mobile units serving rural areas.

“Our goal is twofold — achieving the highest imaging performance while enhancing accessibility for diverse populations,” Goldan said.

U.S. Healthcare Homepage