Implementation of a mobile cardiac PET imager for the emergency room and intensive care unit

Often emergency room and intensive care unit patients are in a condition too critical to be safely moved to a hospital´s nuclear medicine suite to assess their cardiac function. To address this need we have built an economically practical mobile cardiac PET based imager for use in an intensive care/emergency room environment. The system is based on a pair of low profile 25 cm x 25 cm detector heads. Each head is structured in a modular fashion in that it utilizes an array of position sensitive photomultiplier tubes (PSPMTs) coupled to a Nal(Tl) crystal array. Sixteen Burle 85002-800 micro-channel plate-based PSPMTs are arranged to form each detector head resulting in a 25 cm x 25 cm field of view. The Nal(Tl) scintillating crystal array for each detector head is composed of 5 mm x 5 mm x 12.5 mm crystal elements spaced at a 5.5 mm step. The modular readout architecture has achieved over 100 kHz coincidence trigger rate. The system is now installed at Shands Hospital at the University of Florida and is undergoing phantom tests in anticipation of future clinical trials.