A Panel PET With Window: Design, Performance Evaluation, and Prototype Development

Positron emission tomography (PET) scanners with new features, such as open structure, compact size, and adaptive field of view (FOV), have attracted significant attention. Among these novel designs, panel PET has the potential to combine the open structure and variable FOV into a compact form. In this paper, we would like to further exploit these structural advantages by proposing a modified version, called the panel PET with window (PPW). A PPW is a panel PET with a rectangular opening in the center of one detector panel, which inherts the advantages of the compact size and adjustable FOV of the panel PET. Meanwhile, it utilizes fewer detector modules and offers additional flexibility and convenience in practical applications. We quantitatively evaluated the imaging performance of the PPW based on Monte Carlo simulations and real data experiments using a prototype system. The results show that the PPW system sensitivity, spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) deteriorate, and the effective FOV narrows down. However, the deterioration is not linear to the increase of window size. In our extreme case with 69.4% of detectors removed from a panel, the degradation of SNR, CNR, and spatial resolution are 42.4%, 43.1%, and 25.0%, respectively. Meanwhile, the contrast recovery coefficient of PPW remains almost constant.