Abstract
The traditional lack of techniques suitable for in vivo imaging has induced a great interest in molecular imaging for preclinical research. Nevertheless, its use spreads slowly due to the difficulties in justifying the high cost of the current dedicated preclinical scanners. An alternative for lowering the costs is to repurpose old clinical gamma cameras to be used for preclinical imaging. In this paper we assess the performance of a portable device, that is, working coupled to a single-head clinical gamma camera, and we present our preliminary experience in several small animal applications. Our findings, based on phantom experiments and animal studies, provided an image quality, in terms of contrast-noise trade-off, comparable to dedicated preclinical pinhole-based scanners. We feel that our portable device offers an opportunity for recycling the widespread availability of clinical gamma cameras in nuclear medicine departments to be used in small animal SPECT imaging and we hope that it can contribute to spreading the use of preclinical imaging within institutions on tight budgets.
Highlights
The traditional lack of techniques suitable for in vivo imaging has induced a great interest in molecular imaging for preclinical research
We feel that our portable device offers an opportunity for recycling the widespread availability of clinical gamma cameras in nuclear medicine departments to be used in small animal Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging and we hope that it can contribute to spreading the use of preclinical imaging within institutions on tight budgets
We present our preliminary experience with a portable device working coupled to a single-head clinical gamma camera and we assess its performance to be used for small animal SPECT imaging
Summary
The traditional lack of techniques suitable for in vivo imaging has induced a great interest in molecular imaging for preclinical research. As large detectors are pricy, the current trend in preclinical SPECT is to design low-magnification systems with very small pinhole diameters, in order to improve the spatial resolution despite decreasing the sensitivity [4,5,6,7]. A low-cost solution is to keep static the gamma camera and rotate the animal [13, 14] Following this trend, we have designed a portable device that can be attached to a clinical gamma camera to generate preclinical SPECT images. We present our preliminary experience with a portable device working coupled to a single-head clinical gamma camera and we assess its performance to be used for small animal SPECT imaging
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