Image Reconstruction for the Dual-Head Flat-Panel PET System with Asymmetric Detector Arrays

• Main Authors: Chun-Hao Kao, 高均豪
• Other Authors: Cheng-Ying Chou
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/17919047599706595234

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 生物產業機電工程學研究所 === 101 === Positron emission tomography is a nuclear medicine imaging systems that is widely used in clinical diagnosis. In recent years, small animal PET system has been developed for drug development of animal experiments. Although such a system has a high-resolution characteristic, the signal to be detected is also lower due to the smaller animal size compared to the human body. To obtain a high sensitivity, a suitable PET system that adopts dual-head flat panel detectors has been proposed. Such a system has the advantages of high component density and a large detection area. Therefore, this kind of system possesses characteristics of both high resolution and high sensitivity. In this work, we developed a novel dual-head flat panel positron emission tomography (PET) system with asymmetric detector arrays. In this system, two detector arrays of different sizes are aligned in parallel. The smaller and larger detector arrays are comprised of crystals of finer and larger sizes, respectively. When an object is imaged by such a system, the detailed features and the general structure of the object can be captured. The design of this system can provide images with detailed description in some certain regions of interest without having to utilize two expensive high-resolution detectors, thereby lowering the cost. Such a system can be applied in many clinical uses such as the screening of prostate cancer. To explore the full potential of system configuration for lesion detection, we employ a theoretical approach that allows fast computation of evaluating the detectability of a lesion. The theoretical results can help us to find the optimization of our proposed system configuration.