Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The instrumentation used for the nuclear medical imaging technique of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) shares many features with the instrumentation used for electromagnetic calorimetry. Both fields can certainly benefit from technical advances in many common areas, and this paper discusses both the commonalties and the differences between the instrumentation needs for the two fields. The overall aim is to identify where synergistic development opportunities exist. While such opportunities exist in inorganic scintillators, photodetectors, amplification and readout electronics, and high-speed computing, it is important to recognize that while the requirements of the two fields are similar, they are not identical, and so it is unlikely that advances specific to one field can be transferred without modification to the other.