UTSW Small Animal Positron Emission Imager

• Published in: IEEE transactions on nuclear science Vol. 53; no. 5; pp. 2591 - 2600
• Main Authors: Tsyganov, E.N., Anderson, J., Arbique, G., Constantinescu, A., Jennewein, M., Kulkarni, P.V., Mason, R.P., McColl, R.W., Oz, O.K., Parkey, R.W., Richer, E., Rosch, F., Seliounine, S.Y., Slavine, N.V., Srivastava, S.C., Thorpe, P.E., Zinchenko, A.I., Antich, P.P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-10-2006; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Animals; Antibodies; arsenic; Clustering algorithms; FDG; Image reconstruction; Imaging phantoms; Iterative algorithms; Mice; Positron emission tomography; Radioactive decay; Rats; small animal imaging; Solid scintillation detectors
• ISSN: 0018-9499; 1558-1578
• DOI: 10.1109/TNS.2006.876000

A Small Animal Imager (SAI) for PET has been designed, built, tested in phantoms, and applied to investigations in mice and rats. The device uses principles based on gamma-ray induced scintillation in crossed fiber optic detectors connected to Position Sensitive Photomultiplier Tubes (PSPMT). Each detector consists of an epoxied stack of 28 layers of 135 round 1 mm BCF-10 scintillating plastic fibers. The overlap region forms a 13.5times13.5times2.8 cm 3 detector volume. Scintillating light from the fibers is detected by two (X and Y directions) Hamamatsu R-2486 PSPMTs with 16 anode wires in each of two orthogonal directions. A centroid-finding algorithm gives the position of a light cluster on the face (photocathode) of a PSPMT. The accuracy of the reconstruction of an interaction position is essentially independent of light cluster position. This translates to a nearly isotropic photon response for the entire detector. The system has been used to test several 3D image reconstruction algorithms, software modifications, and improvements. The sensitivity (~12.6 cps/kBq at 9 cm inner diameter) and sub-millimeter spatial resolution (better than 1 mm in phantoms) obtained with an iterative algorithm incorporating system modeling make the SAI a relatively inexpensive high performance animal imager. The SAI is currently being used for imaging experiments in mice and rats