Influence of Rotation Increments on Imaging Performance for a Rotatory Dual-Head PET System

For a rotatory dual-head positron emission tomography (PET) system, how to determine the rotation increments is an open problem. In this study, we simulated the characteristics of a rotatory dual-head PET system. The influences of different rotation increments were compared and analyzed. Based on this simulation, the imaging performance of a prototype systemwas verified. A reconstruction flowchart was proposed based on a precalculated system response matrix (SRM). The SRM made the relationships between the voxels and lines of response (LORs) fixed; therefore, we added the interpolation method into the flowchart. Five metrics, including spatial resolution, normalized mean squared error (NMSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), contrast-to-noise (CNR), and structure similarity (SSIM), were applied to assess the reconstructed image quality. The results indicated that the 60 degrees rotation increments with the bilinear interpolation had advantages in resolution, PSNR, NMSE, and SSIM. In terms of CNR, the 90 degrees rotation increments were better than other increments. In addition, the reconstructed images of 90 degrees rotation increments were also flatter than that of 60 degrees increments. Therefore, both the 60 degrees and 90 degrees rotation increments could be used in the real experiments, and which one to choose may depend on the application requirement.