Preliminary performance evaluation of a high resolution small animal PET scanner with monolithic crystals and depth-of-interaction encoding

A preliminary user evaluation of the Albira small animal PET scanner is presented. The system has Oslash 80 times 40 mm² field of view. In the center of the field of view it has 0.8% sensitivity with 33% solid angle coverage. Maximum of noise equivalent counts is 25 kcps for 8.9 MBq for a mouse phantom. The scanner employs an innovative crystal design of only eight 40 (50) times 40 (50) times 9.8 mm LYSO tapered monolithic crystals forming detector modules read by position sensitive photomultipliers. This design allows easy depth of interaction readout. The system saturates at 8.9 MBq for the mouse phantom. As an example of application of the Albira system, some preliminary results from a study on animal models on ischemic stroke with 18-FDG co-registered with MRI images are shown.