cMiCE:a high resolution animal PET using continuous LSO with a statistics based positioning scheme

We have investigated the feasibility of using a continuous miniature crystal element (cMiCE) detector module for high-resolution small animal PET applications. The detector module consists of a single continuous slab of LSO, 25×25 mm in exposed cross-section and 4 mm thick, coupled directly to a PS-PMT (Hamamatsu R5900-00-C12). Further, a new statistics based positioning (SBP) algorithm has been implemented to address linearity and edge effect artifacts that are inherent with conventional Anger style positioning schemes. Detector performance has been evaluated for both SBP and Anger based decoding using measured data and Monte Carlo simulations. Using the SBP scheme, edge artifacts were successfully handled. Simulation results show that the useful field of view (UFOV) was extended to ∼22×22 mm with an average point spread function of ∼0.5 mm full width at half maximum (FWHM_PSF). For the same detector with Anger decoding the UFOV of the detector was ∼16×16 mm with an average FWRM_PSP of 4.9 mm. Experimental results yielded similar differences between FOV and resolution performance. FWHM_PSF for the SBP and Anger based method was 1.4 mm and 2.0 mm, uncorrected for source size, with a 1 mm diameter point source, respectively. The results demonstrate that the SBP scheme yields improved performance over traditional Anger techniques for our cMiCE detector.