In 2021, the SuS research group filed an invention for patent protection through the university. Following examination by the European Patent Office, the patent has now been granted under number EP4473742 and is therefore fully valid. Patent protection has been applied for in several countries.
The patent describes a readout architecture that enables decay data in PET scanners to be efficiently aggregated and read out in chronological order. This makes it easier and more cost-effective to build PET scanners with a very large number of channels, which are increasingly being sought. A chip that implements this architecture has been designed and manufactured and is currently being installed and tested by the research group.