Абстрактный

Simulation and evaluation of a cost-effective high-performance brain PET scanner.

Musa S Musa, Dilber U Ozsahin, Ilker Ozsahin

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) plays a vital role in molecular imaging, primarily for cancer detection. Most commercialized PET scanners are dedicated to the whole body (WB) studies, with very few dedicated to organs like the brain, heart and breast. Brain studies require scanners with high spatial resolution and sensitivity, due to the pathologies associated with the brain. On one hand, semiconductor-based PET detectors have an excellent intrinsic spatial resolution but are not cost effective. On the other hand, scintillator-based PET detectors can provide high system sensitivity and are cost-effective, but they lack the spatial resolution required to detect very small brain lesions. Therefore, the intrinsic spatial resolution of such detectors needs to be improved. In order to improve the spatial resolution of scintillator detectors, a brain PET scanner (“MB-PET”) employing 1 × 1× 10 mm3 pixelated lutetium yttrium oxyorthosilicate (LYSO) detector was simulated using Geant4 application for emission tomography (GATE) simulation, and its performance was evaluated with National electrical manufacturers association (NEMA) phantom studies. The complete scanner has a 35.0 cm detector ring diameter, axial field of view (FOV) of 24.5 cm and trans-axial FOV of 31.0 cm. The spatial resolution varied across the FOV from approximately 1.0 to 1.28 mm full width at half maximum (FWHM) in the trans-axial direction and 1.03 to 2.05 mm (FWHM) in the axial direction. The scanner has 3.7% system sensitivity and a scatter fraction of 48%.