Development of high performance single photon emission computed tomography systems for simultaneous nuclear molecular imaging and magnetic resonance imaging

Cadmium tellurium (CdTe);Cadmium zinc tellurium (CZT);Energy resolved photon counting detector;Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT);MR compatible SPECT;Compound eye gamma camera;SPECT/MRI;Nuclear molecular imaging;Cell imaging

Lai, Xiaochun

关键词: Cadmium tellurium (CdTe);    Cadmium zinc tellurium (CZT);    Energy resolved photon counting detector;    Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT);    MR compatible SPECT;    Compound eye gamma camera;    SPECT/MRI;    Nuclear molecular imaging;    Cell imaging;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/95457/LAI-DISSERTATION-2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Simultaneous nuclear molecular imaging (NMI) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have great potential for pre-clinical and clinical applications, especially for cell imaging in brain cancer models. We have pursued an intensive research effort to develop high-performance single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) systems for simultaneous NMI/MRI. This kind of system has sub-mm and even higher resolving power that allows a matched resolution for SPECT and MRI to visualize details about cell retention and migration, and provides a significant improvement of system sensitivity, even comparable with the sensitivity of positron emission tomography (PET), enabling detection of a small number of cells.The first key step to develop a high-performance SPECT system was building the first generation MR- compatible SPECT, called MRC-SPECT-I, which was a stationary full-ring system, consisting of forty MR- compatible, energy-resolved, photon-counting, and highly-pixelated CdTe semiconductor detectors. Preliminary studies demonstrated the system ability to track as few as 400 neural stem cells in a mouse brain with a sub-500 µm resolution.Although the MRC-SPECT-I was a state-of-the-art SPECT system, to further improve SPECT performance for simultaneous NMI and MRI, an inverted compound-eye (ICE) gamma-ray camera was proposed here for SPECT imaging applications and experimentally verified through a prototype system. The MRC-SPECT-II was designed utilizing 24 ICE gamma camera modules and consisted of more than 1,500 micro-pinhole cameras. The simulation results verified that the MRC-SPECT-II system was more than ten times as sensitive as conventional SPECT systems were while retaining a sub-500 µm resolving capability. Combining the high sensitivity of the SPECT system and the high soft tissue contrast and temporal resolution of MRI, simultaneous SPECT/MRI provides an attractive platform for functional and cell imaging of a wide range of disease models, such as cancers and neurodegenerative diseases.