A liquid Xenon Positron Emission Tomograph for small animal imaging : first experimental results of a prototype cell

TL;DR

This paper presents initial experimental results of a liquid Xenon PET prototype for small animal imaging, demonstrating promising energy, time, and spatial resolution capabilities that could improve PET imaging by reducing parallax errors.

Contribution

First experimental evaluation of a liquid Xenon PET detector with a position sensitive photomultiplier, highlighting its potential advantages for small animal imaging.

Findings

LXe prototype achieved good energy resolution

Demonstrated effective spatial and time resolution

Potential to reduce parallax effects in PET imaging

Abstract

A detector using liquid Xenon (LXe) in the scintillation mode is studied for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) of small animals. Its specific design aims at taking full advantage of the Liquid Xenon scintillation properties. This paper reports on energy, time and spatial resolution capabilities of the first LXe prototype module equipped with a Position Sensitive Photo- Multiplier tube (PSPMT) operating in the VUV range (178 nm) and at 165 K. The experimental results show that such a LXe PET configuration might be a promising solution insensitive to any parallax effect.