Instrumentation optimization for positron emission mammography

The past several years have seen designs for PET cameras optimized to image the breast, commonly known as Positron Emission Mammography (PEM) cameras. The guiding principal behind PEM instrumentation is that a camera whose field of view is restricted to a single breast has higher performance and lower cost than a conventional PET camera. The most common geometry is a pair of parallel planes of detector modules, although geometries that encircle the breast have also been proposed. The ability of the detectors to measure the depth of interaction (DOI) is also a relevant feature. This paper finds that while both the additional solid angle coverage afforded by encircling the breast and the decreased blurring afforded by the DOI measurement improve performance, for small lesions the ability to measure DOI is more important than the ability to encircle the breast.