Monitoring of Microfluidics Systems for PET Radiopharmaceutical Synthesis Using Integrated Silicon Photomultipliers

Silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) can be used to sense the position and movement of the radioactive reagents involved in the synthesis of radiopharmaceuticals, while providing information on the evolution through the different steps of this synthesis. An SiPM array can be placed next to a lab-on-chip substrate made of PDMS and is able to detect particles emitted by ¹⁸F, the radioisotope used in fluorine-based positron-emission tomography (PET) imaging. In this paper, an array of 16 SiPM sensors is used to monitor the synthesis of [¹⁸F]-based radiopharmaceuticals. Results prove that it is possible to measure the position of the radioactive sample with adequate spatial and temporal resolution.