Revisiting low energy deuteron production of [18F] fluoride and fluorine for PET

Fluorine-18 is currently the most widely used radioisotope in PET imaging. While much attention has been paid in recent years to production methods from O-18(p,n)F-18, the current work revisits production techniques using nonenriched neon targets and the Ne-20(d,alpha)F-18 reaction. While this reaction was originally pursued, and ultimately replaced by the higher yielding O-18 reactions, there is an opportunity using high current low-energy deuteron accelerators and the inherent simplicity of gas targetry to provide viable alternatives to the costly O-18 water target systems. F-18 production systems have been developed for the gas-phase Ne-20(d,alpha)F-18 reaction with deuterons from a 3MV NEC 9SDH-2 electrostatic tandem accelerator. High power target systems allowing for irradiation in excess of 100uA provided [F-18]F-2 yields to 86% of the theoretical maximum, and [F-18]F- yields with a wash-off system of 80% of the maximum.