Initial performance evaluation of a high resolution Albira small animal positron emission tomography scanner with monolithic crystals and depth-of-interaction encoding from a user's perspective

The user evaluation of the Albira small animal positron emission tomography scanner is presented. The system has a 80 mm × 40 mm field of view. In the center of the field of view, it has 2.49% sensitivity, with 33% solid angle coverage, and 0.88% sensitivity for a mouse phantom. The maximum of noise equivalent counts is 14.6 kcps at 6.0 MBq for a mouse phantom. The scanner employs an innovative crystal design of eight 40(50) × 40(50) × 9.8 mm3 LYSO tapered monolithic crystals forming detector modules read by position-sensitive photomultipliers. This design allows for easy depth-of-interaction readout. The system saturates at 6.7 MBq for the mouse phantom. As an example of the application of the Albira system, some preliminary results from a study of ischemic stroke on animal models with 18-FDG co-registered with MRI images are shown.