Automation for the Synthesis and Application of PET Radiopharmaceuticals

Introduction The development of automateds ystems supporting the production and application of PET radiopharmaceuticals has been an important focus of researchers since the first successes of using carbon-11 (Comar et al., 1979) and fluorine-18 (Reivich et al., 1979) labeled compounds to visualize functional activity of the human brain. These initial successes of imaging the human brain soon led to applications in the human heart (Schelbert et al., 1980), and quickly radiochemists began to see the importance of automation to support PET studies in humans (Lambrecht,1982; Langstrom et al., 1983). Driven by the necessity of controlling processes emanating high fluxes of 51 lKeV photons, and by the tedium of repetitive syntheses for carrying out these human PET investigations, academic and government scientists have designed, developed and tested many useful and novel automated systems in the past twenty years. These systems, originally designed primarily by radiochemists, not only carry out effectively the tasks they were designed for, but also demonstrate significant engineering innovation in the \ field of laboratory automation. These laboratory automation systems draw heavily on the c.hemical engineering concepts of unit operations and have evolved from isolated manually operated electro-mechanical devices to large-scale integrated systems uti lizing .