Programmable electronics for low-cost small animal PET/SPECT imaging

✍ Scribed by Pedro Guerra; Jose L. Rubio; Georgios Kontaxakis; Juan E. Ortuño; Maria J. Ledesma; Andres Santos

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 345 KB
• Volume: 569
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0168-9002
• DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2006.08.042

✦ Synopsis

This work describes and characterizes the detector module of a novel positron/single photon emission (PET/SPECT) scanner for small animals. This detector consists of a YAP/LSO phoswich, a photomultiplier and acquisition front-end, and will be used as building block of a low-cost hybrid tomograph. The front-end processes data sampled at a fixed frequency, where a state-of-the-art programmable device estimates scintillation pulse parameters by means of digital algorithms. Finally, the estimated properties of the proposed detector module are used to model a rotating four-head scanner. The performance of the proposed PET/SPECT scanner is estimated and first results are promising in both modalities, deserving further research and optimization.