NEMA NU-4 performance evaluation of a non-human primate animal PET.

The Eplus-260 primate PET is an animal PET imaging system developed by the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is designed to image non-human primates, especially the brain of large non-human primates. The system consists of 48 block detectors arranged in two 24-sided rings with a ring diameter of 263 mm and an axial extent of 64 mm. Each block detector is composed of a 16 × 16 cerium-doped lutetium-yttrium orthosilicate crystal array with a pixel size of 1.9 × 1.9 × 10 mm3. This article presents a performance evaluation of the PET scanner according to the National Electrical Manufacturers Association NU-4 2008 standards. All measurements were made for an energy window of 360-660 keV and a coincidence timing window of 2 ns. In terms of the FWHM, the FBP reconstructed spatial resolution results in all three directions at the radial position of 5 mm were better than or approached to 2 mm, and remained below 3.0 mm within the central 5 cm diameter of the FOV. The peak absolute sensitivity of the scanner was measured 1.80%. For a monkey-sized phantom, the scatter fraction was 34.2% and the peak noise equivalent count rate (NECR) was 26.5 kcps at 64.3 kBq/cc. The overall imaging capabilities of the scanner were also assessed using in vivo imaging study of a rhesus macaque. The performance measurements demonstrate that the Eplus-260 primate PET scanner has the potential ability to obtain good quality and high-contrast images for non-human primates, especially the brain of large non-human primates and could be considered as one technologically advanced dedicated non-human primate PET scanner available today.

A compact, high signal-to-noise ratio line-detector array Compton scatter imaging system based on silicon photomultipliers.

We develop a compact, high signal-to-noise ratio line-detector array Compton scatter imaging system based on Y2SiO5 scintillators and silicon photomultipliers. It is shown that the system's response uniformity is better than 98% for low-Zeff materials after a specific correction. Backscatter images of an "IHEP"-character model, cubes of different materials, and some other applications are presented, to show its potential for use in nondestructive testing.

Far field 3D localization of radioactive hot spots using a coded aperture camera.

This paper presents a coded aperture method to remotely estimate the radioactivity of a source. The activity is estimated from the detected counts and the estimated source location, which is extracted by factoring the effect of aperture magnification. A 6mm thick tungsten-copper alloy coded aperture mask is used to modulate the incoming gamma-rays. The location of point and line sources in all three dimensions was estimated with an accuracy of less than 10% when the source-camera distance was about 4 m. The estimated activities were 17.6% smaller and 50.4% larger than the actual activities for the point and line sources, respectively.