A dedicated PET system for human brain and head/neck imaging

Commercially available positron emission tomography (PET) systems are usually combined with a CT or MR scanner and targeted for human whole-body imaging. This paper describes a new high-resolution stand-alone PET system, Rainbow VHD, developed by PINGSENG Healthcare Inc., which is dedicated to human brain and head/neck imaging.The attenuation correction of this stand-alone PET system can either be derived from importing an external CT image of the same patient or from an approximation based on the boundary obtained from its own PET data. Due to the rigid nature of the region of interest, it is deemed feasible to first accurately register the external CT image with a preliminary PET image and subsequently apply the CT-based attenuation correction to the final PET reconstruction for improved image quality. Furthermore, this system is featured with a unique design: keeping the patient table fixed while moving the detector ring, which improves patient comfortability and meanwhile reduces motion-introduced image blurring.The performance of this system has been demonstrated with preliminary data based on phantom and in-vivo rabit studies. The superior image quality due to its ultra-high spatial resolution allows one to better identify small structures in human brain and head/neck images.