The VORTEX Project - funded by Carl Zeiss Stiftung

Versatile, Open-source Resource for Tomographic and Extendable medical imaging

The Challenge

Modern clinical imaging — CT, MRI, PET, SPECT — delivers extraordinary diagnostic information,
but only under highly controlled conditions: stationary infrastructure, specialized staff, and
time that emergency or mobile care situations often do not afford. The result is a persistent gap
between where imaging is needed and where it is available.

VORTEX closes this gap. We are developing a compact, portable, open-source multimodal imaging
platform that combines the physical principles of photon-counting CT, Compton-camera molecular
imaging, Positron Emission Tomography (PET), and Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) on a
single shared hardware architecture — the Hybrid Pixel Detector (HPD).

Technology

How VORTEX Works:
At the core of VORTEX is the Hybrid Pixel Detector (HPD) — a photon-counting detector
technology capable of recording individual photons with energy resolution, sub-nanosecond
timing, and single-photon sensitivity. By sharing one detector architecture across modalities,
VORTEX achieves:
- Spectral CT: low-dose, flexible trajectory, Region-of-Interest scanning
- Compton camera imaging: collimator-free 3D gamma imaging with 4pi acceptance
- PET: coincidence photon detection, high-resolution ROI scanning
- Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) and magnetically enhanced impedance methods

The Robotic Gantry as Imaging Component:
A key design principle of VORTEX is that the robotic detector gantry is not a support
structure — it is an active imaging component. Non-standard acquisition trajectories,
ROI scanning, and multi-modal synchronization are only possible with active robotic guidance.
This makes VORTEX a genuinely robot-native imaging system.