Performance Evaluation of Magnetic Compatible PET Insert Scanner Prototype Using GATE

This paper simulate to evaluate the performance of a magnetic compatible small animal PET scanner prototype in GATE (Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission) platform. The scanner consist of total 60 detectors arranged in 5 contiguous rings. Each detector has a lutetiumyttriumoxyorthsilicate (LYSO) scintillator array read out by a SiPMs array. The scintillator consist of 13×13 crystals of size 1.8×1.8×15 mm3. The diameter of crystals ring is 102 mm and the whole scanner axial extent of 125.4 mm, proving the maximal acceptance angle of 50.8 degrees. The spatial resolution, sensitivity, scatter fraction and the image quality performance of this scanner were assessed following the NEMA NU4 standard using the data obtained from GATE. In simulation, the energy resolution was set to 26% while the energy windows and coincidence time windows was 300-650 keV and 3.75 ns respectively. The result presents that the transverse spatial resolution better than 2 mm in the center region of FOV. The sensitivity up to 20.97% and the NECR peak value reaches 2,256 kcps with the scatter fraction of 20.8%. Much more, the percentage standard deviation of the uniform region is 12.8% while the spill over ration of air and water region is 14.77% and 19.19% separately.