Limited-angle TOF-PET for intraoperative surgical applications: Simulation Study

TL;DR

This simulation study evaluates a limited-angle TOF-PET system's imaging performance for intraoperative use, analyzing how detector parameters affect image resolution and quality using GATE Monte Carlo simulations.

Contribution

The paper models and assesses a dual-panel limited-angle TOF-PET system for intraoperative applications, exploring detector parameter impacts on imaging performance.

Findings

Detector pixel size influences image resolution.

Timing resolution affects contrast recovery.

Phantom size impacts image quality.

Abstract

In this work, we present modeling and imaging performance of a dual panel limited-angle TOF-PET system for intraoperative surgical applications using GATE monte carlo toolkit. Several detector parameters such as detector pixel dimensions, timing resolution and depth of interaction resolution along with tumor uptake ratio and phantom dimension are varied. Ultimately TOF-PET detector properties to achieve a specific imaging task are presented. To assess image resolution, we employed Simple Back Projection (SBP) reconstruction due to its fast speed compared to list-mode Maximum Likelihood Expectation Maximization (MLEM). We evaluated the quality of the reconstructed images using metrics contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), contrast recovery coefficient (CRC), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The purpose is to show effects of different detector parameters on the resolution of reconstructed images.