TY - JOUR
T1 - The engineering and initial results of a transformable low-cost high-resolution PET camera
AU - Li, Hongdi
AU - Wong, Wai Hoi
AU - Baghaei, Hossain
AU - Uribe, Jorge
AU - Wang, Yu
AU - Zhang, Yuxuan
AU - Kim, Soonseok
AU - Ramirez, Rocio
AU - Liu, Jiguo
AU - Liu, Shitao
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received January 4, 2007; revised June 8, 2007. This work was supported in part by an NIH-EB01481 PHS Grant, NIH-EB00217 PHS Grant, NIH-EB01038 PHS Grant, U.S. Army-Breast Cancer Research Grant, and in part by the Texas ARP/ATP under Grant 003657-0058-2001.
PY - 2007/10
Y1 - 2007/10
N2 - We have developed a high-resolution transformable positron emission tomography (PET) camera that can be configured into either a whole-body mode (83-cm detector ring diameter, 13-cm axial field-of-view (AFOV)) or a brain/breast/axilla (54-cm detector ring diameter, 21-cm AFOV) mode. The camera has 12 rectangular detector modules, and the detector gap between adjacent modules is very small and remains constant for each configuration. Each module has a large detection area (13 cm × 21 cm) and 3 168 bismuth germanate (BGO) detector crystals of 2.7 × 2.7 × 18 mm 3 with built-in front-end electronics. To improve spatial sampling, the gantry on which the camera is mounted can be rotated 30° with a fine step size of 1°, and the high-speed electronics and detector modules also rotate along with the gantry. This system uses only 924 photomultiplier tubes (PMT) by applying a low-cost high-resolution PMT-quadrant-sharing detector design. To compensate for the slower scintillation timing of BGO detectors, the camera is equipped with the "HYPER", high-yield pile-up event recovery front-end electronics. A fast light-emitting diode (LED) cross-reference PMT tuning method is used to maintain the PMT gain balance. The system has been constructed and tested for preliminary imaging characteristics. The system sensitivity is 4.2% for whole-body and 9.2% for brain/breast/axilla mode measured with Na-22 at center of field of view (FOV). For brain/breast/axilla modes, the transaxial image resolutions at 0,10 cm were found to be 2.7 and 4.0 mm, respectively, while for whole-body mode, the image resolutions were 3.3 and 3.9 mm. The slice thickness resolution ranged from 2.6 to 3.3 mm for middle 7 detector rings in brain/breast/axilla modes. High quality Hoffman brain phantom images were obtained in both brain and whole-body modes.
AB - We have developed a high-resolution transformable positron emission tomography (PET) camera that can be configured into either a whole-body mode (83-cm detector ring diameter, 13-cm axial field-of-view (AFOV)) or a brain/breast/axilla (54-cm detector ring diameter, 21-cm AFOV) mode. The camera has 12 rectangular detector modules, and the detector gap between adjacent modules is very small and remains constant for each configuration. Each module has a large detection area (13 cm × 21 cm) and 3 168 bismuth germanate (BGO) detector crystals of 2.7 × 2.7 × 18 mm 3 with built-in front-end electronics. To improve spatial sampling, the gantry on which the camera is mounted can be rotated 30° with a fine step size of 1°, and the high-speed electronics and detector modules also rotate along with the gantry. This system uses only 924 photomultiplier tubes (PMT) by applying a low-cost high-resolution PMT-quadrant-sharing detector design. To compensate for the slower scintillation timing of BGO detectors, the camera is equipped with the "HYPER", high-yield pile-up event recovery front-end electronics. A fast light-emitting diode (LED) cross-reference PMT tuning method is used to maintain the PMT gain balance. The system has been constructed and tested for preliminary imaging characteristics. The system sensitivity is 4.2% for whole-body and 9.2% for brain/breast/axilla mode measured with Na-22 at center of field of view (FOV). For brain/breast/axilla modes, the transaxial image resolutions at 0,10 cm were found to be 2.7 and 4.0 mm, respectively, while for whole-body mode, the image resolutions were 3.3 and 3.9 mm. The slice thickness resolution ranged from 2.6 to 3.3 mm for middle 7 detector rings in brain/breast/axilla modes. High quality Hoffman brain phantom images were obtained in both brain and whole-body modes.
KW - High-resolution
KW - Low-cost
KW - Positron emission to-mography (PET)
KW - Transformable
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U2 - 10.1109/TNS.2007.905156
DO - 10.1109/TNS.2007.905156
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:35349024397
SN - 0018-9499
VL - 54
SP - 1583
EP - 1588
JO - IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science
JF - IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science
IS - 5
ER -