Development of a Test-Bench for the Accurate Positioning of Scintillation Detector Modules for Medical Imaging Applications

Abstract

When assessing the impact of novel concepts of scintillation block detectors for PET tomography by measuring the performance of single modules, or one module in coincidence with another, it is not trivial to translate the results of these investigations into a real PET scanner, made of several rings of modules. In particular, the real sensitivity, the signal to noise ratio of reconstructed images, and the spatial resolution (especially in the areas far from the center of field of view) among others are very critical to understand how good a PET scanner will perform for a real patient, and they are specific of the fully assembled scanner. Hence, demonstrating that a new idea under development is worth implementing in a real scanner requires more than just a measurement with two modules one in front of the other. For this reason, the set-up described in the present work will permit to reproduce full ring conditions using only a few modules at the price of a very good positioning accuracy.I must express all my gratitude towards one of my colleagues at CERN MME Group, Tommi Mikkola, for his infinite patience and teachings when reviewing the design and drawings of the mechanical parts