Effects of thermal regulation structures on the photon sensitivity and spatial resolution of a 1 mm3 resolution breast-dedicated PET system

This work presents the effect of special mechanical structures inter-dispersed between detectors on the photon sensitivity and spatial resolution of a 1 mm3 resolution breast dedicated PET scanner. A degradation of (7–8)% on the single photon sensitivity and 15% on the coincidence photon sensitivity has been estimated from simulated data. However, no significant effect on both intrinsic and reconstructed spatial resolution was predicted by simulations. A reduction on the number of the multi-interaction photon events has also been observed which leads to a minor improvement on spatial resolution under the presence of additional material surrounding the LYSO-PSAPD detectors. Even though the analysis presented above used a rather inaccurate positioning scheme of multi-interaction photon events among detectors, more sophisticated algorithms are currently under development in order to properly identify and include these events in the analysis [5]. Currently Al structures that will assure a good compromise between mechanical robustness, temperature stability and satisfactory system performance are under construction