Tomographie and planar evaluation of dual head small animal PET

This article presents the performance evaluation in planar and tomographic mode, of a low cost dedicated PET camera for small animal imaging. The system consists of two pixelated LSO crystals, two Hamamatsu H8500 PSPMTs, fast amplification electronics and a FPGA based read out system. The main parameters that have been studied are i) saturation as a function of acceptance angle ii) effect of projections number and total rotation degrees iii) spatial resolution and iv) system's sensitivity. Image reconstruction has been carried out with open source software previously developed by our group, the QSPECT. In addition Monte Carlo simulations of the system have been carried out, in order to investigate the system performance with the used of different scintillation crystals and geometries.