Development and evaluation of a double-plane detector system for multi-radionuclide imaging

Purpose To develop a multi-radionuclide imaging system with a flexible and compact structure that has a potential for breast and other applications, and to evaluate its performances under both positron emission tomography and single photon emission imaging conditions. Methods The plane detector was composed of 5 × 6 blocks with an effective detection area of 168.6 mm × 202.4 mm. Each block consisted of a 16 × 16 LYSO array. The pixel size is 1.9 mm × 1.9 mm × 15 mm. An 8 × 8 silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) array with SensL’s C-30035 sensors was coupled to the LYSO array, separated by a 1.5-mm-thick glass. To minimize the influence of temperature on the detector, the active part of the front-end electronics was kept away from SiPMs. Self-designed data acquisition system and reconstruction software were utilized to evaluate the performances of the whole system. Results All the blocks had excellent pixels identification. An average energy resolution of 11.39% for 511 keV and 21.37% for 140 keV was obtained. In the PET mode, the best spatial resolution was better than 2 mm and the system sensitivity reached up to 11.05% at 60 mm distance. In the single photon emission imaging mode, a spatial resolution better than 3 mm was obtained. Conclusion The results indicated that the system has a good overall performance and can be used in breast imaging and other general PET applications. It also has the potential to be used for single photon emission imaging. In pursuit of a better spatial resolution of cross-plane, PSF and DOI technology will be developed in the next work. For specific applications, further improvement of the detector system such as performance evaluation with phantoms will be carried out.