Operational and performance report on ANIPET, a versatile PET scanner for laboratory animals

Presents the properties and the performance of the ANIPET scanner which has been designed for imaging positron-emitting tracers in small laboratory animals. It has two planar BGO-PS-PMT detectors with a useful FOV of 59×54 mm. These can be separated by 75-200 mm to optimize detection efficiency with different sized laboratory animals ANIPET has the capacity to scan in 3D mode for brain images or 2D mode for whole body scanning. The spatial resolution at the centre of the field of view is 2.8 mm FWHM for 2D mode scans and 3.2 mm in the 3D mode. The coincidence timing resolution is 10 ns FWHM. The system efficiency varies from 1% to 0.1% as the detector separation increased from 75 to 200 mm and the energy discriminator window is increased from 150 to 450 keV