Abstract
We investigated a prototype virtual-pinhole positron emission tomography (PET) system for small-animal imaging applications. The PET detector modules were made up of 1.3 mm lutetium-yttrium oxyorthosilicate (LYSO) arrays, and the insert detectors consisted of 0.6 mm pixelated cadmium zinc telluride (CdZnTe). To validate the imaging experiment, we did a Monte Carlo simulation for the virtual-pinhole PET (VP-PET) system in the Geant4 Application for Emission Tomography (GATE). For a point source of 22Na with a 0.5 mm diameter, the filtered back-projection algorithm-reconstructed PET image showed a resolution of 0.7 mm full-width-at-half-maximum. The system sensitivity was 0.46 cps/kBq at the center of the field view of the PET system with a source activity of 0.925 MBq and an energy window of 350 to 650 keV. A rod source phantom and a Derenzo phantom with 18F were also simulated to investigate the PET imaging ability. GATE simulation indicated that sources with 0.5 mm diameter could be clearly detected using 0.6 mm pixelated CdZnTe detectors as insert devices in a VP-PET system.
Highlights
Dedicated positron emission tomography (PET) scanners for small-animal studies have been investigated frequently in the past decades
PET scanner is usually limited to approximately 1 mm full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM), which is not enough to carry out quantitative studies of a mouse brain
In the entire range of the insert ring, the radial resolutions of the PET system reconstructed by the II, IS, and SS coincidence data at FWHM were 0.63 to 0.87 mm, 0.78 to 0.99 mm, and 1.22 to 1.57 mm and radial resolutions obtained by thethe
Summary
Dedicated positron emission tomography (PET) scanners for small-animal studies have been investigated frequently in the past decades. PET scanner is usually limited to approximately 1 mm full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM), which is not enough to carry out quantitative studies of a mouse brain. To improve the image resolution of conventional PET scanners, some novel PET geometries have been proposed. One such PET system is called a virtual-pinhole PET (VP-PET) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], which uses high-resolution detectors integrated into a commercial PET scanner to achieve both high resolution and high sensitivity
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