Search

A NEMA performance evaluation was conducted on the new General Electric (GE) digital Omni Legend PET-CT system with 32-cm extended field-of-view. This study marks the introduction of the first-ever commercially available clinical digital bismuth germanate technology. Testing was performed in accordance with the NEMA NU2-2018 standard. A comparison was made with the performance of two other commercial GE scanners with extended fields-of-view. A digital lutetium yttrium orthosilicate system (Discovery MI - 6 ring) and a non-digital bismuth germanate system (Discovery IQ). For the Omni assessment, the tangential, radial, and axial spatial resolutions at 1 cm radial offset were measured as 3.76 mm, 3.73 mm, and 4.25 mm FWHM. The total system sensitivity to a line source at the center was 44.36 cps/kBq. The peak NECR was 501 kcps at 17.8 kBq/mL. The scatter fraction at NECR peak was 35.48%, and the maximum count-rate error at and below NEC peak was 5.5%. Sphere contrast recovery coefficients were from 52% (10 mm) to 93% (37 mm). The system does not use time of flight; thus, no assessment of timing resolution was made. The PET-CT co-registration accuracy was 2.4 mm. The performance of the Omni Legend surpassed that of the Discovery MI on all NEMA tests, except for assessments of background variability (image noise). Time of flight is associated with inherent improvements in signal-to-noise ratio. In lieu of time of flight capabilities, the Omni provides software corrections in the form of a pre-trained neural network (trained on non-ToF to ToF). With such corrections, average performance is competitive when compared to ToF systems. Further validation is required to optimize clinical imaging protocols and hyperparameters associated with such software corrections and to examine the effect of non-linear corrections with varying target size, particularly for real world, clinical scans.

We study the feasibility of using neutrino-electron elastic scattering to measure the neutrino flux in the DUNE neutrino oscillation experiment. The neutrino-electron scattering cross section is precisely known, and the kinematics of the reaction allow determination of the incoming neutrino energy by precise measurement of the energy and angle of the recoiling electron. For several possible near detectors, we perform an analysis of their ability to measure neutrino flux in the presence of backgrounds and uncertainties. With realistic assumptions about detector masses, we find that a liquid argon detector, even with limitations due to angular resolution, is able to perform better than less dense detectors with more precise event-by-event neutrino energy measurements. We find that the absolute flux normalization uncertainty can be reduced from ~8% to ~2%, and the uncertainty on the flux shape can be reduced by ~20-30%.

Neutrino interactions with nuclei have been the subject of intense interest over the last 15 years. Current and future measurements of neutrino oscillation and exotic physics use order 0.1--10 GeV neutrinos on a range of nuclear targets ($^{12}$C, $^{16}$O, $^{40}$Ar). As the precision of these experiments has increased, information from their detectors and dedicated experiments indicate deficiencies in the modeling of neutrino interactions on nuclear targets. Here, we present the current state of knowledge about neutrino-nucleus interactions, the challenge of extracting the cross section of these processes, and current experimental puzzles in the field. We also look forward to new and novel measurements and efforts in the future which seek to resolve these questions., Comment: Manuscript accepted by Annual Reviews Nuclear and Particle Science

National Crime Survey data is used to examine forceful reaction to criminal victimization. Describes three groups of victims who fight back: those who use a gun, those who use another weapon, and those who use physical force, and presents key aspect characteristics of the victimization incident for each of the three victim-response groups. (JPS)