Title :
RPC-PET: a new very high resolution PET technology
Author :
Blanco, A. ; Carolino, N. ; Ferreira, Nuno C. ; Correia, C.M.B.A. ; Macedo, M.P. ; Fazendeiro, L. ; Marques, M. F Ferreira ; Marques, R. Ferreira ; Gil, C. ; Fonte, P.
Abstract :
In this study we present experimental and simulated results from a first prototype of a positron emission tomography (PET) system based on the resistive plate chamber (RPC) technology-a gaseous particle detector developed for high energy physics. The prototype is aimed at validating the expectations, derived from simulations, of a system with sub-millimeter spatial image resolution and no parallax error, which may be useful for the imaging of small animals. By imaging a point-like 22Na source in the transaxial plane, an intrinsic spatial resolution of 0.52 mm FWHM was demonstrated for a system diameter of 60 mm. A corresponding image spatial resolution of 0.5 mm FWHM was obtained using the standard algorithm of filtered back projection and 0.4 mm FWHM after reconstruction by an ML-EM type algorithm. An optimized complete system was simulated to evaluate sensitivity and system count rate performance for the imaging of mice, suggesting a sensitivity up to 2.1 % at the centre of the field of view and a peak NEC rate up to 320 Kcps for a total activity of 100 MBq in the phantom.
Keywords :
image resolution; medical image processing; phantoms; position sensitive particle detectors; positron emission tomography; 22Na source; FWHM; PET technology; full width half maximum; gaseous particle detector; high energy physics; mice; phantom; positron emission tomography; resistive plate chamber; small animals; sub-millimeter spatial image resolution; Animals; Energy resolution; High-resolution imaging; Image reconstruction; Image resolution; Mice; Positron emission tomography; Radiation detectors; Spatial resolution; Virtual prototyping;
Conference_Titel :
Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record, 2004 IEEE
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-8700-7
DOI :
10.1109/NSSMIC.2004.1462730