The development of a new mode of medical imagery by IMT Atlantique (SUBATECH joint research lab 6457 - IMTAtlantique - French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)/IN2P3-University of Nantes) in partnership with Air Liquide should open up new horizons in the area of personalised medical and therapeutic care in oncology. A first camera, XEMIS (Xenon Medical Imaging System), will be installed in 2018 in the new pre-clinical Applied Multimodal Imagery Centre of the University Hospital of Nantes. Designed from an active core made up of 200kg of liquid xenon, this camera applies new generation technologies with the objective of reducing by a factor of 100 the quantity of radioactive drugs used to produce images of cancer patients. It is the first camera of its type ever built in the world. The demonstration will be carried out using a field of view capable of imaging small mammals.
Research in the area of developing instruments containing liquid xenon is currently at the cutting edge of innovation enabling better observation of the fundamental properties of nature at the smallest scale. Cameras used in nuclear medical imagery should be able to reinforce the quality of the images used in order to better understand the functioning of each patient: they enable precise, three-dimensional localisation of the position of certain radioactive drugs through a geometric triangulation mechanism, providing a new means of medical imaging, christened "three-photon imaging".
The drugs used here are the object of research by units of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), the University Hospital and the ARRONAX cyclotron in Nantes. For Dominique Thers, scientific director of XEMIS, "today, developing technology at a human scale is proving to be fascinating, and one of the great adventures still liable to pit man's inventiveness against the limits of nature."
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Read more about Xemis project (french)
by Pierre-Hervé VAILLANT
