A PET system design by using mixed detectors: resolution properties

Abstract

We investigate a cylindrical positron emission tomography (PET) system design strategy that employs two groups of detectors with different resolutions. The reason for considering this strategy is the observation that in many tasks one would want a higher resolution in a targeted region, which contains lesions or organs of interest, than that in the rest of the subject. Although one can design a PET system to meet the highest resolution required by the imaging task, this is not cost efficient because the superior resolution outside the target region is not needed. To address this issue, investigators have proposed the concept of an insert, in which a high-resolution detector (HRD) is inserted into a parent PET system to locally increase the image resolution. In this paper, we examine an alternative strategy in which the system is made of one arc of normal-resolution detectors with respect to, for example, whole-body imaging and one arc of HRDs. By using Monte Carlo simulations, we study the resolution properties of this system design and examine how they are affected by the location and size of the HRD arc. Our results show that the region obtained by connecting the edges of the HRD arc to the center of the field-of-view (FOV) can have significantly better resolution than that in the rest of the FOV, as well as better resolution uniformity.