Tsyganov, Edward N., Anderson, Jon, Arbique, Gary, Constantinescu, Anca, Jennewein, Marc, Kulkarni, Padmakar V., Mason, Ralph P., McColl, Roderick W., Oz, Orhan K., Parkey, Robert W., Richer, Edmond, Rosch, Frank, Seliounine, Serguei Y., Slavine, Nikolai V., Srivastava, Suresh C., Thorpe, Philip E., Zinchenko, Alexander I., and Antich, Peter P.
A Small Animal Imager (SAI) for PET has been designed, built, tested in phantoms, and applied to investigations in mice and rats. The device uses principles based on [gamma]-ray induced scintillation in crossed fiber optic detectors connected to Position Sensitive Photomultiplier Tubes (PSPMT). Each detector consists of an epoxied stack of 28 layers of 135 round 1 mm BCF-10 scintillating plastic fibers. The overlap region forms a 13.5 x 13.5 x 2.8 [cm.sup.3] detector volume. Scintillating light from the fibers is detected by two (X and Y directions) Hamamatsu R-2486 PSPMTs with 16 anode wires in each of two orthogonal directions. A centroid-finding algorithm gives the position of a light cluster on the face (photocathode) of a PSPMT. The accuracy of the reconstruction of an interaction position is essentially independent of light cluster position. This translates to a nearly isotropic photon response for the entire detector. The system has been used to test several 3D image reconstruction algorithms, software modifications, and improvements. The sensitivity (~12.6 cps/kBq at 9 cm inner diameter) and sub-millimeter spatial resolution (better than 1 mm in phantoms) obtained with an iterative algorithm incorporating system modeling make the SAI a relatively inexpensive high performance animal imager. The SAI is currently being used for imaging experiments in mice and rats. Index Terms--Antibodies, arsenic, FDG, image reconstruction, positron emission tomography, small animal imaging.