Feasibility of a brain-dedicated PET-MRI system using four-layer DOI detectors integrated with an RF head coil

We are developing a PET-MRI system which consists of PET detectors integrated with the head coil of the MRI in order to realize high spatial resolution and high sensitivity in simultaneous measurements. In the PET-MRI system, the PET detectors which consist of a scintillator block, photo-detectors and front-end circuits with four-layer depth-of-interaction (DOI) encoding capability are placed close to the measured object. Therefore, the proposed system can achieve high sensitivity without degradation of spatial resolution at the edge of the field-of-view due to parallax error thanks to the four-layer DOl capability. In this paper, we fabricated a prototype system which consists of a prototype four-layer DOI-PET detector, a dummy PET detector and a prototype birdcage type head coil. Then we used the prototype system to evaluate the performance of the four-layer DOI-PET detector and the reciprocal influence between the PET detectors and MRI images. The prototype DOI-PET detector consists of six monolithic multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC) arrays (S11064-050P), a readout circuit board, two scintillator blocks and a copper shielding box. Each scintillator block consists of four layers of Lu1.8Gd0.2SiO5:Ce (LGSO) scintillators and reflectors are inserted between the scintillation crystals. The dummy detector has all these components except the two scintillator blocks. The head coil is dedicated to a 3.0 T MRI (MAGNETOM Verio, Siemens) and the two detectors are mounted in gaps between head coil elements. Energy resolution and crystal identification performance of the prototype four-layer DOI-PET detector were evaluated with and without MRI measurements by the gradient echo and spin echo methods. We identified crystal elements in all four layers from a 2D flood histogram and energy resolution of 15-18% was obtained for single crystal elements in simultaneous measurements. The difference between the average energy resolutions and photo-peak positions with and without MRI measurements was lower than 0.3 percentage points and 1.7% for all layers. The results indicated that these performances were sufficient as PET detectors for the proposed PET-MRI system and there was no influence from the MRI measurements on the PET imaging in the simultaneous measurements. The signal-to-noise ratio of the MRI image and static magnetic field of the MRI were also evaluated with and without measurements of the PET detectors. The maximum decrease of the static magnetic field clue to the LGSO scintillators was approximately 1 ppm. The signal-to-noise ratio decreased from 242.80 without the PET detector to 44.948 in simultaneous measurements. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.