Performance Evaluation and Calibration of the Neuro-PET Scanner

The Neuro-PET is a circular ring seven-slice positron emission tomograph designed for imaging human heads and small animals. The scanner uses 512 bismuth germanate detectors 8.25 mm wide packed tightly together in four layers to achieve high spatial resolution (6-7 mm FWHM) without the use of beam blockers. Because of the small 38 cm ring diameter, the sensitivity is also very high: 70,000 c/s per true slice with medium energy threshold (375 keV) for a 20 cm diameter phantom containing 1 μCi/cc of positron-emitting activity, according to a preliminary measurement. There are three switch-selectable thresholds, and the sensitivity will be higher in the low threshold setting. The Neuro-PET is calibrated with a round or elliptical phantom that approximates a patient's head; this method eliminates the effects of scatter and self-attenuation to first order. Further software corrections for these artifacts are made in the reconstruction program, which reduce the measured scatter to zero, as determined with a 5 cm cold spot. With a 1 cm cold spot, the apparent activity at the center of the cold spot is 18% of the surrounding activity, which is clearly a consequence of the limits of spatial resolution, rather than scatter. The Neuro-PET has been in clinical operation since June 1982, and approximately 30 patients have been scanned to date.