NEMA NU-4 performance evaluation of PETbox4, a high sensitivity dedicated PET preclinical tomograph

PETbox4 is a new, fully tomographic bench top PET scanner dedicated to high sensitivity and high resolution imaging of mice. This manuscript characterizes the performance of the prototype system using the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) NU 4–2008 standards, including studies of sensitivity, spatial resolution, energy resolution, scatter fraction, count-rate performance and image quality. The PETbox4 performance is also compared with the performance of PETbox, a previous generation limited angle tomography system. PETbox4 consists of four opposing flat-panel type detectors arranged in a box like geometry. Each panel is made by a 24 × 50 pixelated array of 1.82 × 1.82 × 7mm bismuth germanate (BGO) scintillation crystals with a crystal pitch of 1.90mm. Each of these scintillation arrays is coupled to two Hamamatsu H8500 photomultiplier tubes via a glass light guide. Volumetric images for a 45 × 45 × 95 mm field of view (FOV) are reconstructed with a maximum likelihood expectation maximization (ML-EM) algorithm incorporating a system model based on a parameterized detector response. With an energy window of 150–650 keV, the peak absolute sensitivity is approximately 18% at the center of FOV. The measured crystal energy resolution ranges from 13.5% to 48.3% full width at half maximum (FWHM), with a mean of 18.0%. The intrinsic detector spatial resolution is 1.5mm FWHM in both transverse and axial directions. The reconstructed image spatial resolution for different locations in the FOV ranges from 1.32mm to 1.93 mm, with an average of 1.46 mm. The peak noise equivalent count rate for the mouse-sized phantom is 35 kcps for a total activity of 1.5 MBq (40 µCi) and the scatter fraction is 28%. The standard deviation in the uniform region of the image quality phantom is 5.7%. The recovery coefficients range from 0.10 to 0.93. In comparison to the first generation two panel PETbox system, PETbox4 achieves substantial improvements on sensitivity and spatial resolution. The overall performance demonstrates that the PETbox4 scanner is suitable for producing high quality images for molecular imaging based biomedical research.