Design of a compact, mobile PET detector for bedside cardiac imaging

The long term objective of this work is to design and build a compact and mobile PET system for bedside cardiac imaging. For patients under intensive care with severe left heart failure, FDG PET studies are crucial for the decision between emergency bypass surgery versus heart transplantation, but often these patients are too ill to be transported to an outpatient PET center. Our goal is to design a PET system that can be transported within a hospital for imaging in environments such as an intensive care unit (ICU) as well as an operating room or interventional suite. In this paper we investigate by simulation the effect of limited angle acquisition on the quality of reconstructed images for a given compact detector design and imaging geometry. We present results of a simulated phantom study that show the effect of changing the number of detector positions, the distance between the detectors and the angles of acquisition.