Performance evaluation of a whole-body prototype PET scanner with four-layer DOI detectors.

Performance evaluation of a whole-body prototype PET scanner with four-layer DOI detectors. Phys Med Biol. 2019 Apr 12;: Authors: Akamatsu G, Tashima H, Iwao Y, Wakizaka H, Maeda T, Mohammadi A, Takyu S, Nitta M, Nishikido F, Rutherford H, Chacon A, Safavi-Naeini M, Yoshida E, Yamaya T Abstract Parallax error caused by the detector crystal thickness degrades spatial resolution at the peripheral regions of the field-of-view (FOV) of a scanner. To resolve this issue, depth-of-interaction (DOI) measurement is a promising solution to improve the spatial resolution and its uniformity over the entire FOV. Even though DOI detectors have been used in dedicated systems with a small ring diameter such as for human brain, breast and small animals, the use of DOI detectors for a large bore whole-body PET system has not been demonstrated yet. We have developed a 4-layered DOI detector, and its potential for a brain dedicated system has been proven in our previous development. In the present work, we investigated the use of the 4-layer DOI detector for a large bore PET system by developing the world's first whole-body prototype. We evaluated its performance characteristics in accordance with the NEMA NU 2 standard. Furthermore, the impact of incorporating DOI information was evaluated with the NEMA NU 4 image quality phantom. Point source images were reconstructed with a filtered back projection (FBP), and an average spatial resolution of 5.2±0.7...
Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - Category: Physics Authors: Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research