Potentials of multispectral acquisition in positron emission tomography

Multispectral acquisition (MSA) positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, whereby the energy information is encoded at the same time as the detector addresses, is proposed as a novel approach to recover useful information from the Compton spectrum and improve both sensitivity and contrast in high-resolution PET images. Preliminary experimental data are reported which demonstrate the potential of MSA for improving scatter correction methods and minimizing sensitivity loss associated with small detectors. MSA PET imaging has the following advantages over standard PET: event selection can be made during or after acquisition in terms of the energy and other suitable parameters derived from the spatial domain; and the increased degrees of freedom in energy space reduce averaging of scatter-dependent variables in the spatial domain and improve scope and flexibility to manipulate data more adequately in each energy range. These features can be exploited to extract useful events from the Compton spectrum and to develop efficient methods to reject undesirable events from all sources