Animal Positron Emission Tomography System of IRI-MicroPET: Evaluation of Performance and Image Quality

Positron emission tomography (PET) system is used in order to diagnose physiology changes in the body. Thus, the goal of the PET studies is to obtain a good quality and detailed image of organs by the PET scanner. The PET system performance and output image quality depend on the parameters including spatial resolution, scatter fraction, sensitivity, RMS contrast and SNR which the system was evaluated based on them. In this paper, system features and tomography method for the IRI-microPET system are considered, firstly. Then, image reconstruction algorithms (MLEM, SART, and FBP) were performed on sinogram and the performance and the acquired images quality were evaluated. The radial and tangential resolutions of 1.81 mm and 1.90 mm for 18F at the center of FOV were measured. The scatter fraction of 7.1% for the mouse phantom and the sensitivity of 1.74% in 4 ns timing window was measured. Finally, images quality was compared by RMS contrast and SNR factors, which MLEM algorithm has superiorityin comparison with the other reconstructed algorithms.The acquired results from IRI-MicroPET system were compared with available commercial animal PET scanner which the results show the good agreement between data.