Positron Emission Tomography with quantum-entangled Compton events: first imaging results at clinically relevant activities
Abstract
In Positron Emission Tomography, a potential, yet unutilized enhancement, may come from exploiting the quantum entanglement of the annihilation quanta, inscribed in the correlation of their polarizations. To investigate this, we built a PET demonstrator capable of measuring polarization correlations of annihilation quanta by their Compton scattering, based on single-layer scintillator polarimeters. We present a detailed study of the imaging of two 68Ge line sources, 45 MBq each, to extract the spatial resolution and assess image quality. The results show that a spatial resolution of 2.5±0.1 mm is obtained using single-pixel events, while resolutions obtained with polarization-correlated Compton events range from 3.6±0.3 mm to 4.9±0.3 mm, depending on data selection criteria. We also found that the polarization-correlated Compton events exhibit up to 20% higher average signal to random background ratio compared to the single-pixel events. We also present the first imaging of the NEMA NU-4 phantom filled with a 68Ga solution of 378 MBq initial activity, successfully combining polarization-correlated events with conventional single-pixel event selection. Based on the extracted spatial resolution, signal-to-background, signal-to-noise, contrast, and contrast-to-noise ratio, we estimate that up to 10% sensitivity increase may be attained by exploiting the polarization-correlated events, while preserving a high image quality.
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BibTeX
@misc{makek2026positron,
title = {{Positron Emission Tomography with quantum-entangled Compton events: first imaging results at clinically relevant activities}},
author = {Mihael Makek and Ana Marija Kožuljević and Tomislav Bokulić and Darko Grošev and Zdenka Kuncic and Siddharth Parashari and Luka Pavelić},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.25804},
eprint = {2606.25804},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25804},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Positron Emission Tomography with quantum-entangled Compton events: first imaging results at clinically relevant activities
AU - Mihael Makek
AU - Ana Marija Kožuljević
AU - Tomislav Bokulić
AU - Darko Grošev
AU - Zdenka Kuncic
AU - Siddharth Parashari
AU - Luka Pavelić
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/03
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.25804
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25804
AB - In Positron Emission Tomography, a potential, yet unutilized enhancement, may come from exploiting the quantum entanglement of the annihilation quanta, inscribed in the correlation of their polarizations. To investigate this, we built a PET demonstrator capable of measuring polarization correlations of annihilation quanta by their Compton scattering, based on single-layer scintillator polarimeters. We present a detailed study of the imaging of two ^68Ge line sources, 45 MBq each, to extract the spatial resolution and assess image quality. The results show that a spatial resolution of 2.5±0.1 mm is obtained using single-pixel events, while resolutions obtained with polarization-correlated Compton events range from 3.6±0.3 mm to 4.9±0.3 mm, depending on data selection criteria. We also found that the polarization-correlated Compton events exhibit up to 20% higher average signal to random background ratio compared to the single-pixel events. We also present the first imaging of the NEMA NU-4 phantom filled with a ^68Ga solution of 378 MBq initial activity, successfully combining polarization-correlated events with conventional single-pixel event selection. Based on the extracted spatial resolution, signal-to-background, signal-to-noise, contrast, and contrast-to-noise ratio, we estimate that up to 10% sensitivity increase may be attained by exploiting the polarization-correlated events, while preserving a high image quality.
ER -