Daily News Briefs

The American Nuclear Society has awarded the 2003 Edward Teller Medal to Laurance J. Suter, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Suter is an expert in hohlraums, the tiny gold containers that hold a laser target as intense x-rays heat it during inertial confinement fusion experiments. Suter's work has most recently focused on laser hohlraum physics at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). His latest work shows how to further improve the efficiency and yield of potential NIF ignition experiments. His work on hohlraum x-ray physics has also led to the development of novel high-efficiency x-ray sources for a variety of other applications. The American Nuclear Society also awarded a Teller Medal to Hideaki Takabe, a professor at the Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University in Japan. The awards will be presented at the Third International Conference on Inertial Fusion Sciences and Applications, to be held Sept. 10 in Monterey, Calif. . . .

PET Project: This image, acquired by 3-D-LSO PET/CT in three minutes, clearly reveals evidence of cancer in a 60-year-old patient. Researchers at the UCLA School of Medicine produced the images as part of their study examining the impact of acquisition time on image quality.

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine researchers, including Johannes Czernin and Benjamin Halpern, have received the The Society of Nuclear Medicine's annual Image of the Year award for images acquired using a positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) imager with 3-D lutetium oxyorthosilicate (3-D LSO) technology, a system developed by CPS Innovations, a joint venture of Siemens Medical Solutions and CTI Molecular Imaging Inc. The new technology increases efficiency and reduces the duration of acquiring images, the society said. The award-winning images were taken from a UCLA study that compared PET image quality and lesion detectability from one-, two-, three- and four-minute PET images obtained in the same patients.