Septa design for a prostate specific PET camera

The recent development of new prostate tracers has motivated us to build a low cost PET camera optimized to image the prostate. Coincidence imaging of positron emitters is achieved using a pair of external curved detector banks. The bottom bank is fixed below the patient bed, and the top bank moves upward for patient access and downward for maximum sensitivity. We study the design of septa for the prostate camera using Monte Carlo simulations. The system performance is measured by the detectability of a prostate lesion. We have studied 17 septa configurations. The results show that the design of septa has a large impact on the lesion detection at a given activity concentration. Significant differences are also observed between the lesion detectability and the conventional noise equivalent count (NEC) performance, indicating that the NEC is not appropriate for the detection task.