Detection Performance Evaluation For Panel-PET

Positron Emission Tomography (PET), a nuclear medical technique being widely used, detecting metabolic changes in the organ to distinguish between tumor and healthy body, thus in the early diagnosis of cancer and treatment play an increasingly important role.Panel-PET applies innovative detector structure to scanner, which employs two large detection panels. Each scanner is about 25×17×2 cm3 in size. Traditionally, people tend to use the annular scanner to collect data. Panel-PET is lack of detectors at both side. So the count rate of panel-PET is lower than that of ring-PET, and plenty of missing view affects the quality of image reconstruction. The detection performance for panel-PET hasn't been validated credibly.This thesis based on Monte-Carlo nuclear medical simulation software package GATE, modeled panel-PET system, evaluated and analysed the detection performance of panel-PET. By validating the simulation result against the experimental measured data or related ring-PET simulation results, the feasibility and availability for detection performance of panel-PET could be demonstrated.The results indicated an about 22% central sensitivity when using a 350-650 keV energy window, whose was higher than the ring-PET; the noise equivalent count rate curve fit the experimental result well; the result of sensitivity and noise equivalent count rate provided valuable reference for optimization of detection performance; the maximum of scatter fraction was 10.0106%,which was much lower than that of ring-PET; as the result shown, the efficient counts collected at the both side of body is limited for the abdominal struction, so the missing data would not affect the quality of image reconstruction.The research results of this thesis provided credible basis for the panel-PET system integration and valuable references for design and development of panel-PET.