Design and First Results of an Innovative and Dedicated Breast PET

In this work the design and preliminary clinical results obtained with an innovative and dedicated breast PET is presented. A geometrical study clearly pointed out the advantages of the prone position and the technique of hanging breast in comparison to the supine, conventionally used for other imaging modalities. Occult, multifocal and also lesions close to the pectoral muscle were depicted by means of the prone method. The measured diameters of the hanging breasts allowed us to define an optimum transaxial FOV of up to 170 mm. This was achieved by means of 12 detector heads mounted on ring geometry, each using a monolithic LYSO crystal a position sensitive photomultiplier, among other components. The detector showed up an extrinsic spatial resolution as high as 1.4 mm in the center of the FOV with a physical sensitivity of 1.2 %. A clinical trial is undergoing at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in terms of a clinical validation of the dedicated breast PET. An adequate image matching between this device and the whole-body PET was observed, even for deep chest lesions. A preliminary quantitative comparison also shows a good agreement between both systems. However, a tiny deviation to higher Standard Uptake Values is observed for the prototype.