Sensitivity And Spatial Resolution Of An Application-adaptive Small Animal PET

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a kind of noninvasive imaging technique, which can provide three dimensional tomographic images of radiotracer distribution. PET can detect the animal or human's in vivo metabolic changes, biochemical reactions and function activities in a noninvasive, quantitative and dynamic way.Small animal PET is designed for molecular imaging of small animal models.It can provide a longitudinal continuous research on the same animal,and monitor the animal's physiological, biochemical process, as well as the effects of vatious treatments. Compared with clinical PET imaging, small animal PET imaging requires higher sensitivity and spatial resolution, especially for the mouse imaging. Developing a high sensitivity and high resolution small animal PET is one of the major objectives in this feild. Therefore, Performance evaluation of the sensitivity and spatial resolution of small animal PET are of great importance.In this paper, based on the NEMA NU 4-2008 standard published by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, we evaluate the sensitivity and spatial resolution of an all digital application-adaptive small animal PET developed by our research group; we aim to obtain the system's absolute sensitivity, axial profile of sensitivity, spatial resolution and other parameters. The physical factors which affect impact the measurement results are also studied. Meanwhile, the preparation of the phantoms required for performance evaluation is introduced in this paper. We hope that this work will benefit the follow-up research and further performance evaluation of the small animal PET system in our laboratory.