Monte Carlo simulation-based design study of a LSO-LuAP small animal PET system

The goal of this work is to perform simulation studies to define the geometrical design of our LSO-LuAP PET´ prototype that optimises resolution and sensitivity performances. To that purpose, we first adapted a Monte Carlo simulation tool originally developed for human PET scanners and validated agains the CTI/Siemens ECAT EXACT HR+ scanner to the specificity of small animal systems. A preliminary validation study was performed against the Concorde MicroPET scanner Then, different geometrical configurations of the LSO-LuAP prototype were studied. Detector modules were arranged in a ring with no interplane septa. The number of modules defining the ring diameter was set either to 16 or 20. For each combination of the free parameters (number of detectors, crystal length, electronic front-end), sensitivity and spatial resolution of the simulated scanners were assessed. The effect of parallax correction based on DOI measurement was also evaluated.