Design study of a cardiac-dedicated PET system

The work studies the feasibility of developing a cardiac-dedicated PET system using Monte Carlo simulation tools. The proposed system comprises a dual-panel geometry and both panels utilize fine crystal elements (~2-3 mm) to help improve high spatial resolution. The system performances were studied with respect to photon detection sensitivity, count-rate performances, spatial resolution, depth-of-interaction (DOI) capability, and potential contrast recovery improvement due to time-of-flight (TOF). For a 2:3 dual panel configuration (front panel: 24.0×18.0 cm² and back panel: 36.0×27.0 cm²), the system is able to achieve a peak photon sensitivity of ~13.0% at the location of the heart. For count-rate performances, the system is able to yield a continuous increase of noise equivalent count rate (NECR) as a function of the total activity of radiotracers between 10 mCi and 50 mCi. When crystal elements of 2×2×20 cm³ are deployed in the front panel and crystal elements of 3×3×20 cm³ are deployed in the back panel, the proposed system is not only able to revolve 2 mm diameter spheres in the image slices parallel to the panels but also demonstrates good resolution uniformity of less than 5%. On the other hand, significant resolution degradation occurs in the direction perpendicular to the panels due to the following two factors: limited angular coverage and finite DOI resolution. Such degradation was quantitatively analyzed for five different DOI resolutions (0 mm, 2.5 mm, 5 mm, 10 mm and 20 mm), as well as three different crystal configurations. Finally, the contrast study with a heart-like phantom (comprising lumen, aortic wall, myocardium and small lesions) indicates that TOF capability (time resolution: 250-500 ps) does not significantly improve image quality and lesion detectability, in terms of contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR).