A modification of the dual energy window subtraction method for scatter compensation in pixelized scintillators for SPECT

Small field of view detectors based on Position Sensitive Photomultiplier Tubes (PSPMTs) have been widely used by many research groups in small-animal imaging and recently clinically in scintimammography. In most cases the PSPMT is coupled to pixelized scintillators since it has been shown that their use improves spatial resolution. The use of a single energy window for each crystal element is the only proposed method for scatter correction in pixelized scintillators. In this work we have modified the dual energy window subtraction technique in order to be applicable to a pixelized scintillator detector and we have evaluated its performance with real data. Hot, cold and breast phantoms have been imaged in planar mode.