Sri-Harsha Maramraju1,2, S.-David Smith2,
Martin Purschke2, Sean Stoll2, Bosky Ravindranath1,
Sergio Rescia2, Sachin Junnarkar2, Sudeepti Southekal1,
Paul Vaska2, Craig Woody2, David Schlyer2
1Biomedical engineering, Stony Brook
University, Stony Brook, NY, United States; 2Brookhaven National
Laboratory, Upton, NY, United States
We
have developed a MRI compatible PET tomograph for use inside a 9.4 T microMRI
scanner. This synergistic integration resulted in simultaneous acquisition of
MR and PET imaging of rodents with minimal mutual interference between the
two systems. New MRI coils have been built that fit inside the PET detector
and obtain high quality MR images. Simultaneous MR and PET images of a rat
striata phantom, rat brain and gated mouse cardiac images have been acquired,
providing the flexibility to perform both rat brain and mouse cardiac studies
using the same PET detector inside MRI.