Breast cancer is nowadays one of the biggest public health problems, representing the second biggest cause of death in women. The goal of the Portuguese consortium, within the framework of the CERN Crystal Clear Collaboration is to develop a PET scanner optimized for breast cancer diagnosis: PEM (Positron Emission Mammography).
The PET-PEM detector is basically composed by two electronic plates, face-to-face, containing a grand total of 6144 detection crystals. The detected signals are amplified e fine filtered by an electronic system that uses state-of-the-art electronic devices and are sent to a high-performance computer for image reconstruction. Specifically develop software algorithms output a 3-dimension image of the detected signals set.