Simulation studies of a high resolution SPECT system for a photon counting semiconductor detector

Abstract

Photon counting detector using cadmium telluride (CdTe) or cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) has benefits compared to conventional scintillation detector. These materials have advantageous physical characteristics for nuclear medicine imaging. Recently, for improvement of the sensitivity and the spatial resolution, many researchers have been investigated using these materials. By using the pixelated parallel-hole collimator, we may be able to improve the sensitivity in small pixel condition and the spatial resolution. In this study, we simulated the SPECT system using the photon counting detector based on CdTe and CZT, and evaluated the performance of these systems. We performed a simulation study using the Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission (GATE) simulation. The proposed system was equipped with a CdTe and CZT detector with very small pixels such as 0.35 × 0.35 mm2. The results showed that the proposed system could be acquired the 0.46 mm spatial resolution located at 2 cm from the collimator. In conclusion, our results demonstrated that we established the high resolution SPECT system with the pixelated parallel-hole collimator.