The construction of ever larger and costlier accelerator facilities has its limits, and new technologies will be needed to push the energy frontier. Plasma Wakefield acceleration is a rapidly developing field which appears to be a promising candidate technology for future high-energy accelerators. This refresher course introduces the plasma wakefield acceleration technology, gives a summary of recent results of beam and laser driven plasma wakefield acceleration and shows the technological challenges on the example of beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiments.

Edda Gschwendtner, CERN, Switzerland

This course will describe the technological developments which have made it possible to propose and construct trigger-less readout systems even for high-rate instruments with a large channel counts. The developments both in link-technology and in data acquisition possibilities will be discussed in detail. The main cost-drivers and how design can help to minimize cost will be discussed and illustrated with concrete examples.

Niko Neufeld, CERN, Switzerland

Radiation-induced damage in silicon can be modeled in TCAD simulations through effective states in the energy gap, what we call radiation damage models.

After a brief introduction about radiation-induced damage in silicon, in this talk I will present you some of the available radiation damage models, how to implement them in TCAD tools and what are typical observables you can study in simulations. I will also comment on some issues related to annealing and charge collection efficiency. To conclude I will try to present the outlook for radiation-induced damage studies with TCAD simulation tools.

Marco Bomben, IN2P3-LPNHE, France

In this educational lecture, we will cover the recent advances and future potentials in Image processing, image quality and parametric imaging. We will first provide an update on current state-of-art and potential new research directions in image processing, particularly the radiomics and machine learning. We will then summarize the new algorithms designed for direct estimation of various graphical and full kinetic models. And then introduce some new applications of parametric imaging in cardiology and oncology, particularly focusing on the clinical whole body dynamic imaging and its potential applications. We will also briefly introduce the new development on parametric imaging of non-stationary kinetic models and joint PETMRI models.

Quanzheng Li, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

This one hour refresher course will briefly cover four of the foundations of image reconstruction for PET imaging, and proceed to consider current advances and future directions for PET image reconstruction. The first foundation is the choice of parameters to estimate, starting from voxels, through to more complex spatial basis functions (which can, for example, make use of MRI information), through to time activity curves and kinetic parameters. The second foundation to be covered is system modelling, which provides a model of the mean of the Poisson distributed PET data, starting from elementary line-integral models through to models including motion, resolution, attenuation and scatter, exploiting high accuracy simulations and measurements. The third foundation will be that of the objective function, starting from a Poisson log-likelihood, progressing to consider regularized objective functions which impose prior probabilities on the parameters to estimate. Finally, the fourth foundation to be considered is that of algorithms, starting from the popular EM algorithm, through to consideration of more advanced optimization methods such as ADMM, which finds application in simultaneous reconstruction of PET and MR data.

Andrew Reader, Biomedical Engineering, King's College, London, UK

This refresher course will provide an overview of current and near future detector and hardware technologies for nuclear medicine and positron emission tomography. The basic characteristics of solid state and inorganic crystal scintillators and how they impact detector performance will be described. In addition, the principles of operation of photosensor technology (e.g., photomultiplier tubes, avalanche photodiodes, and silicon photomultiplier devices) will be provided, again with a focus on how device characteristics impact detector performance. A brief overview of detector electronics will be given. The presentation will conclude with a description of past and current innovative detector designs and where future improvements can be made to advance the performance of nuclear medicine and PET imaging systems.

Robert Miyaoka, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

MIC summary session covering presentations made at this years MIC in all areas of research (hardware and software).

Joel S. Karp, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

Richard E. Carson, Yale University, New Haven, USA