A TOF-PET prototype with position sensitive PMT readout

A prototype of time-of-flight positron emission computed tomography (TOF-PET) has been developed for acquiring the coincident detection of 511 keV gamma-rays produced from positron annihilation. It consists of two 80.5 mmx80.5 mm LYSO scintillator arrays (composed of 35 x35 pixel finger crystals) with the position sensitive photomultiplier tubes R2487 as the readout. Each array is composed of 2 mm x2 mm x 15 mm finger crystals and the average pixel pitch is 2.30 mm. The measured results indicate that the TOF information has the potential to significantly enhance the image quality by improving the noise variance in the image reconstruction. The best spatial resolution (FWHM) of the prototype for the pairs of 511 keV gamma-rays is 1.98 mm and 2.16 mm in the x and y directions, respectively, which are smaller than the average pixel pitch of 2.30 mm.

Image reconstruction by an alternating minimisation

This paper focuses on the problem of incomplete data in the applications of the circular cone-beam computed tomography. This problem is frequently encountered in medical imaging sciences and some other industrial imaging systems. For example, it is crucial when the high density region of objects can only be penetrated by X-rays in a limited angular range. As the projection data are only available in an angular range, the above mentioned incomplete data problem can be attributed to the limited angle problem, which is an ill-posed inverse problem. This paper reports a modified total variation minimisation method to reduce the data insufficiency in tomographic imaging. This proposed method is robust and efficient in the task of reconstruction by showing the convergence of the alternating minimisation method. The results demonstrate that this new reconstruction method brings reasonable performance. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

稀土化合物的一种新用途(上)——核磁共振成像(MRI)用造影剂

磁共振成像(Magnetic Resonance Imaging简称MRI)是近十几年来发展起来的一种新的医疗诊断手段,与x-射线计算机断层扫描(Computed Tomography简称x-CT)相比,具有明显的优点,如对脑部、腹腔部、椎间盘组织等的病变有较高的灵敏度。同时,由于磁场和射频电波对人体健康的损害远远小于x-CT产生的x-射线,因此,MRI法已成为当前