Evaluation of a digital brain Positron Emission Tomography scanner based on the Plug&Imaging sensor technology

Novel technological solutions for the design of dedicated brain positron emission tomography (PET) systems with improved sensitivity and space resolution represent the frontier of current nuclear medicine techniques in neurology. We report a novel digital brain PET system based on the plug&imaging (P&I) sensor technology with transverse and longitudinal field of view (FOV) of 218 mm and 201.6 mm, respectively. We evaluated the performance of the system in accordance with NEMA standards. The novel scanner exhibits a noise equivalent count rate peak of 73 kcps at the activity of 6.57 kBq/ml, a sensitivity of 5.84%, and a spatial resolution at the center of the FOV of approximately 3.3 mm (FWHM) and 1.7 mm (FWHM) when reconstructed with filtered back projection and ordered subset expectation minimization methods with point spread function modeling, respectively. Finally, in order to verify the potential application of the device to brain imaging, we measured the FDG uptake in the brain of a rabbit brain and of a human volunteer.