A small animal PET prototype with sub-millimetre spatial resolution based on tRPCs

  1. Blanco Castro, Alberto
Dirixida por:
  1. Paulo Jorge Ribeiro da Fonte Director
  2. Juan Antonio Garzón Heydt Titora

Universidade de defensa: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Fecha de defensa: 09 de xaneiro de 2012

Tribunal:
  1. Rui Ferreira Marques Presidente/a
  2. Faustino Gomez Rodriguez Secretario
  3. Manuel Sánchez García Vogal
  4. Paulo Alexandre Vieira Crespo Vogal
  5. Enrique Casajeros Ruiz Vogal

Tipo: Tese

Teseo: 318135 DIALNET lock_openMINERVA editor

Resumo

The aim of this thesis is to explore the possibility of building a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) system with sub-millimetre spatial resolution and absence of parallax error based on timing Resistive Plate Chambers (tRPC), to be used in the imaging of small animals. An RPC-PET prototype has been built consisting in two detector heads. Each head is built from sixteen independent metal-glass RPCs with a gas gap of 0.300 mm working on avalanche mode in the standard mixture. The characteristics that could turn a RPC-PET into a competitive system can be summarized as follows: • Sub-millimetre spatial resolution uniform on the entire Field of View (FOV) (parallax free error). Approximately 0.500 mm Full Width at Half Maximun (FWHM), experimentally measured with a point-like 22Na source for a system diameter of 60 mm. • Simulated, absolute central point source sensitivity of 2.1 % and Noise Equivalent Count (NEC) peak of 320 kcps. • Low cost, less than 100 k€, due to the inexpensiveness of the materials used in its constructions (except the FEE and DAQ), allowing the fast spread of the system for many research groups.