Quantitative iodine-124 imaging on animal PET

With a half-live of 4.2 days, iodine-124 (/sup 124/I) is suitable for studying antibodies and drug analogues in animals that have a biological half-live in days. The special challenges with /sup 124/I imaging on animal PET are: 1) the high fraction of high-energy, non-annihilation gamma-rays that introduce true coincidences which elevate the image background activity, and 2) the significant degradation of spatial resolution due to the high positron energies. By simulations and experiments on an animal PET scanner, we characterized these two unique degradation factors and evaluated the corresponding correction methods. The preliminary results of applying non-annihilation true coincidence correction and using /sup 124/I specific point spread function in the system matrix of reconstruction algorithm showed improved contrast and resolution recovery. These findings indicate that higher-resolution, quantitative 1241 applications can be achieved.