Measurement And Analysis Of Count Rate Performance Of An Application-adaptive Small Animal PET

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a kind of noninvasive imaging technique and has also become one of the most important imaging methods in the field of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging. By characterizing the changes of PET tracers'distribution and radiation, the molecular bio-chemical information of organs can be obtained. The development of small animal PET and related PET technologies bring a remarkable increasing use in the preclinical researches which based on animal model.This paper introduces the evaluation of noise equivalent count rate of newly developed application-adaptive small animal PET with changeable structure. The NEMA NU 4-2008 standards which made by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association are specified to the evaluation of small animal PET. For each structure, the scatter fraction and noise equivalent count rate is measured with different detector geometries, energy windows and coincidence windows. After getting the optimized parameters, the influence of the dead-time is discussed. And some suggestions about improvement of prototype PET are also given.The results imply that all of the structures of the prototype can achieve best performance in the typical radiation range with energy window of 250-750 keV and time window of 3ns. This means that the performance of the prototype is comparable or better than most of the commercial small animal PET available now. This work provides some references for the performance evaluation and the applications protocols of the prototype in the future.