Production rate of PET radioisotopes by deuterons from linear accelerators
Ignacio Porras, Fernando Arias de Saavedra and Javier Praena
Departamento de Fisica Atomica, Molecular y Nuclear, Universidad de Granada
Poster
The authors declare no conflict of interest
The standard way of producing the main isotopes used in PET is by accelerating protons in cyclotrons up to energies around 18 MeV with current intensities in the order of a few tens of uA. In the last few years, there has been a lot of interest in the development of a new generation of linear accelerators. These are able to accelerate charged particles to low energies (2–3 MeV) but with mA beam currents. The possibility of producing radioisotopes for PET at lower energies lies on the use of deuterons instead of protons, since their coulomb barrier is smaller. In this
work, we estimate the production rate of the four PET radioisotopes 18F, 11C, 15O, 13N by using deuterons from a low energy, high current linear accelerator. Our results show that the use of 2.5 MeV, 10 uA, linear accelerators, due to their higher beam intensity, provides results for the production rate that are similar in order of magnitude to those obtained from the standard reactions with cyclotrons. As technology can now provide such accelerators, due to the growing interest for other applications as ion implantation, this can be an interesting
option to explore further, and specific targets that can withstand such currents should be developed.