MO‐G‐17A‐01: Innovative High‐Performance PET Imaging System for Preclinical Imaging and Translational Researches

Abstract

Purpose:To develop a practical and compact preclinical PET with innovative technologies for substantially improved imaging performance required for the advanced imaging applications.Methods:Several key components of detector, readout electronics and data acquisition have been developed and evaluated for achieving leapfrogged imaging performance over a prototype animal PET we had developed. The new detector module consists of an 8×8 array of 1.5×1.5×30 mm3 LYSO scintillators with each end coupled to a latest 4×4 array of 3×3 mm2 Silicon Photomultipliers (with ∼0.2 mm insensitive gap between pixels) through a 2.0 mm thick transparent light spreader. Scintillator surface and reflector/coupling were designed and fabricated to reserve air‐gap to achieve higher depth‐of‐interaction (DOI) resolution and other detector performance. Front‐end readout electronics with upgraded 16‐ch ASIC was newly developed and tested, so as the compact and high density FPGA based data acquisition and transfer system targeting 10M/s coincidence counting rate with low power consumption. The new detector module performance of energy, timing and DOI resolutions with the data acquisition system were evaluated. Initial Na‐22 point source image was acquired with 2 rotating detectors to assess the system imaging capability.Results:No insensitive gaps at the detector edge and thus it is capable for tiling to a large‐scale detector panel. All 64 crystals inside the detector were clearly separated from a flood‐source image. Measured energy, timing, and DOI resolutions are around 17%, 2.7 ns and 1.96 mm (mean value). Point source image is acquired successfully without detector/electronics calibration and data correction.Conclusion:Newly developed advanced detector and readout electronics will be enable achieving targeted scalable and compact PET system in stationary configuration with >15% sensitivity, ∼1.3 mm uniform imaging resolution, and fast acquisition counting rate capability for substantially improved imaging and quantification performance for small animal imaging and image‐guided radiotherapy applications.This work was supported by a research award RP120326 from Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.