Usability of PETSIRD, the PET Raw Data open format of the Emission Tomography Standardization Initiative (ETSI): results from ETSI’ s first hackathon

With the advent of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners of increasingly higher sensitivity alongside the evolving capacity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support Nuclear Medicine, the opportunity for accessing high fidelity information through standardized PET raw data has become apparent. The Emission Tomography Standardization Initiative (ETSI) was founded in 2022 from an international consortium of nuclear medicine experts to define open, extendable, standardized and vendor-agnostic formats of emission tomography raw data. Currently, the initiative focuses on developing the PET ETSI Raw Data (PETSIRD) list-mode format comprised of (i) data elements (e.g. coincidence events, geometry, correction factors, etc.), (ii) a container describing the element’s structure and the protocols for access, storage and transfer using Microsoft Research YARDL meta-language, and (iii) a use-cases software library. We report on the progress of developing use-case applications for generating, accessing and processing PETSIRD data.