Development and evaluation of a dual-head PET system for high-throughput small-animal imaging

We investigate the development of high-throughput small-animal PET systems that are suitable for use in screening applications. To the best of our knowledge, imaging throughput has never been explicitly considered as a target performance parameter in PET design. Therefore, it remains unclear how to achieve the desired system performance characteristics and what design issues need to be addressed. This paper presents the first of a series of study that we will conduct to systematically examine and understand the complicated tradeoffs among various design parameters that are involved, in order to produce design guidelines for realizing the proposed high-throughput small-animal PET systems. In particular, we will consider a compact, stationary system that employ two parallel large-area planar detectors with a small spacing between them. We will present considerations that favor this scanner configuration and conduct computer simulations to evaluate its detection performance. The results of our studies indicate that the proposed system configuration is rather favorable.