Speaker
Description
Conventional Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging is based on measurement of energy and coincidence time of back-to-back photons from positron annihilation. The annihilation quanta posses yet another correlation - the orthogonality of their initial polarizations. We developed a demonstrator based on single-layer Compton polarimeters to study the potential of this additional information to enhance PET. We present the imaging tests done with two Ge-68 rod sources of 45 MBq each, and with NEMA NU-4 phantom with a Ga-68 solution of 400 MBq initial activity. To assess the performance we compare the images reconstructed using polarization-correlated Compton events with single-pixel gamma identification, as a reference. We observed the spatial resolutions of from 4.3±0.3 mm to 6.3±0.3 mm, in the former case, and 2.5±0.3 mm in the latter. We also show that ∼10% sensitivity increase can be obtained by combining all events.