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Development and Evaluation of a High-Performance Onboard Animal PET for Preclinical Radiotherapy Research

X Cheng*, K Hu, D Yang, Y Shao, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX

Presentations

(Sunday, 7/12/2020) 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM [Eastern Time (GMT-4)]

Room: Track 1

Purpose: It is highly desirable to develop and integrate an onboard animal PET with an existing CT image-guided small animal irradiator (CT/RT) to establish a paradigm-shifting PET/CT/RT to substantially improve the target accuracy and specificity based on PET functional image, which will open the door to enable many advanced and novel preclinical and translational RT researches. The key to achieve this goal is to develop a compact onboard animal PET with advanced imaging performance.

Methods: We have developed and evaluated a prototype animal PET dedicated for PET/CT/RT. It consists of 12 detector panels configured in a dodecagon; each panel has a 30x30 array of 1x1x20 mm LYSO scintillators with each end of the scintillator array optically connected to Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) arrays for depth-of-interaction (DOI) measurement. The trans-axial and axial field-of-view (FOV) are ~10 cm in diameter and 3.5 cm long. PCB and FPGA based detector readout and processing electronics has been developed. Preliminary system and imaging performances were evaluated with a Na-22 point source and a F-18 ultra-micro hot-rod phantom.

Results: The energy, DOI, and coincidence timing resolutions of the system are around 23%, 3.1 mm, and 14 ns, respectively. The measured system sensitivity is ~6.2% at the center of FOV, and the image resolution measured from the reconstructed point source images over the FOV ranges from 0.77 to 1.03 mm (mean 0.83 mm). Hot-rods with diameters from 1.0 to 2.4 mm are well separated on the reconstructed phantom image when DOI is applied.

Conclusion: A high-performance prototype animal PET has been developed and evaluated with its performance well suited for the preclinical PET imaging. We are further improving the PET performance and will start to integrate the PET with an existing CT/RT.

Keywords

Not Applicable / None Entered.

Taxonomy

IM- PET : Instrumentation

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