One-pair prototype integrated system of DOI- PET and the RF-coil specialized for simultaneous PET-MRI measurements

We are developing a PET system integrated with a birdcage RF coil for PET-MRI to realize highly sensitive PET system for simultaneous measurements. The PET detectors which consist of a scintillator block, photo sensors and front-end circuits with four-layer DOI encoding capability are placed close to the objective. Therefore, the proposed system can achieve high sensitivity without degradation spatial resolution at the edge of the field of view due to parallax error thanks to the four-layer DOI capability. If a shielding material is inside the RF coils, the RF pulse is blocked by the shielding material and then complete images cannot be obtained. Therefore, each RF coil element is inserted between the scintillator crystal blocks and then medially located in the shielding materials. We developed an one-pair prototype system for performance evaluation of PET detector for PET-MRI.