Physical performance of the latest generation of commercial positron scanner

A study of some of the basic physical performance characteristics of an advanced commercial positron-emission tomograph (PET) is reported. It consists of eight rings of BGO (bismuth germanate) detectors (512/ring) with removable interring septa and retractable transmission ring sources for each ring. The (transaxial) detector width is 5.6 mm, and the lower limit of the spatial resolution in the reconstructed image is about 5 mm. Investigations were carried out of count-rate linearity, image count recovery with object size, the effect of attenuation correction on quantitation, and scatter fraction.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>