Performance evaluation of 2D compact PET systems - with applications to system design optimization

In recent years, owing to the need of high spatial resolution and high detection sensitivity for the use of PET in molecular imaging, there has been a growing interest in the development of compact PET systems. Unfortunately, this particular PET configuration has been prohibited by the presence of parallax errors. In recent studies, we have proposed a new design concept for building cost-effective compact PET systems by embedding sinogram restoration methods for removing parallax errors in the output by exploiting redundant information present in the acquired data. In this work, we consider the task of evaluating and comparing the performance of various compact PET systems. The results of this study will provide important design guidelines for building compact PET systems subject to various performance and cost constraints.