Simulation study for designing a compact brain PET scanner

The desire to understand normal and disordered human brain of upright, moving persons in natural environments motivates the development of an ambulatory micro-dose brain PET imager (AMPET) [1]. An ideal system would be light weight and have high sensitivity and spatial resolution. These requirements are often in conflict with each other. Therefore, we performed simulation studies to search for the optimal system configuration and to evaluate the improvement in performance over existing scanners. An intuitive design to achieve high sensitivity is to use a tight geometry that covers the brain. However, a tight geometry also increases parallax error in peripheral lines of response, which may increase the variance in ROI quantification.