Thread by @jay_hickey

An oldie but a goodie: Oxygen-15 water! One of the first isotopes to be used in human imaging, O-15 has a 2 min half-life. That puts a lot of pressure on the #LawsonCyclotron staff to work efficiently 1/

We make it using high energy deuterons. Those are hydrogen atoms with an extra neutrons and a positive charge. These particles hit a N-14 atom, kick out neutron to make O-15. This comes out of the cyclotron as O2 gas 2/

The gas gets mixed with H2 over hot Pt wires where it is reduced to H2O. That bubbles into sterile saline for injection and filtered. We then run it (literally) up 6 floors to the @lawsonresearch hybrid PET/MR @stjosephslondon 3/

Even though it's a rush to make, it remains the gold standard for quantifying cerebral blood flow. @ksstlaw and @tkssali have been working on some cool MR quantification methods and using this probe to validate 4/

Here's preclinical results with clinical underway pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29523628/
5/

Next month I'll present a poster at the @SNM_MI virtual meeting on validating a GMP production of this tracer. Later this month I'll tweet about how we use the O2 directly from the cyclotron into the PET/MR