Abstract
A lower-cost high-sensitivity high-resolution positron emission mammography (PEM) camera is developed. It consists of two detector modules with the planar detector bank of 20 × 12 cm2. Each bank has 60 low-cost PMT-Quadrant-Sharing (PQS) LYSO blocks arranged in a 10 × 6 array with two types of geometries. One is the symmetric block made of 1.5 × 1.5 × 10 mm3 crystals in a 12 × 12 array. The other is the 19.36 × 26.05 mm2 asymmetric block made of 1.5 × 1.9 × 10 mm3 crystals in 12 × 13 array. One row (10) of the elongated blocks are used along one side of the bank to reclaim the half empty PMT photocathode in the regular PQS design to reduce the dead area at the edge of the module. The bank has a high overall crystal packing fraction of 88%, which results in a very high sensitivity. Mechanical design and electronics have been developed for low-cost, compactness, and stability purposes. Each module has four Anger-HYPER decoding electronics that can handle a count-rate of 3 Mcps for single events. A simple two-module coincidence board with a hardware delay window for random coincidences has been developed with an adjustable window of 6 to 15 ns. Some of the performance parameters have been studied by preliminary tests and Monte Carlo simulations, including the crystal decoding map and the 17% energy resolution of the detectors, the point source sensitivity of 11.5% with 50 mm bank-to-bank distance, the 1.2 mm-spatial resolutions, 42 kcps peak Noise Equivalent Count Rate at 7.0-mCi total activity in human body, and the resolution phantom images. Those results show that the design goal of building a lower-cost, high-sensitivity, high-resolution PEM detector is achieved.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 5409985 |
Pages (from-to) | 104-110 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science |
Volume | 57 |
Issue number | 1 PART 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 2010 |
Keywords
- Nuclear imaging
- Nuclear medical applications
- PET instrumentation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Nuclear and High Energy Physics
- Nuclear Energy and Engineering
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering