Prospects for 13N Production in a Small Plasma Focus Device

In this paper, the feasibility of ¹³N radioisotope production by a small plasma focus device for using in positron emission tomography (PET) has been studied. A large quantity of experimental data on the deuteron beam emission in dense plasma focuses are summarized and has been used in estimation of deuteron energy spectrum, intensity and angular distribution. The induced activity of ¹³N by ¹²C(d,n)¹³N reaction in an external solid target is calculated for different ‘m’ values (the power in energy distribution function of deuterons), and for a repetition rate plasma focus. A small plasma focus can produce ¹³N radionuclides in the order of 10 kBq in one shot, and it can be increased to few 10 MBq in a rep rate working mode with f = 10 Hz after 600 s operating time. Whereas a typical PET scan in myocardial blood perfusion assessment requires about 4 GBq radiopharmaceutical of ¹³N, it is concluded that a small plasma focus device, even with repetition frequency of f = 10 Hz can’t produce adequate ¹³N activity for this special PET imaging. Nonetheless, higher producible activities in higher energy PF devices and by endogenous production methods (i.e., nuclear reactions are induced inside the pinch itself) maybe result to introduction of an optimized repetitive high energy plasma focus as an alternative for cyclotrons in this special application.