Yibao Wu1, Yongfeng Yang1, Bo J.
Peng1, Simon R. Cherry1
1Department of Biomedical Engineering,
University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United States
The
next generation of MR-compatible PET insert is under development for
small-animal imaging providing greater than an order of magnitude increase in
sensitivity by utilizing 20 mm thick scintillator crystal elements with
excellent stopping power. A detector module based on avalanche photodiode
read out with depth-of-interaction encoding was designed and evaluated to
overcome the resolution-degrading parallax errors associated with such thick
detectors. Detectors for the new PET insert were characterized in terms of
crystal identification and energy spectra. Data were acquired outside a 7T MR
scanner, inside the MR scanner, with and without sequences running. An MR
phantom also was measured with the PET detector module inside the MR system.
No significant interference between the PET detector module and the MR system
were observed. The design of the new
PET insert based on these detectors is presented.