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Development of a high-resolution YSO gamma camera system that employs 0.8-mm pixels

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Abstract

Objective

YSO (Ce-doped Y2SiO5) is a promising scintillator for a single-photon imaging system since it has relatively high light output and does not contain any natural radioactivity. Since YSO is not hygroscopic, it may be possible to fabricate a block with small pixels for a high-resolution system. For this purpose, we developed a high-resolution gamma camera system that employs smaller than 1-mm YSO pixels.

Methods

The gamma camera’s detector used 0.8 × 0.8 × 7-mm YSO pixels. All the surfaces of these YSO pixels were mechanically polished, combined with a 0.1-mm-thick BaSO4 reflector to form a 48 × 48 matrix, and optically coupled to a high quantum efficiency, 2-inch square position sensitive photomultiplier tube (Hamamatsu Photonics H10966 A-100). The YSO block was 43.2 × 43.2 mm. The YSO gamma camera was encased in a 5-mm-thick tungsten container, and a parallel collimator was mounted on its front. The parallel hole collimator was made of a 3-layer (each layer was 5-mm thick) tungsten plate, and each plate had 48 × 48, 0.6-mm holes that were positioned by one-to-one coupling with the YSO pixels.

Results

Even with the 0.8-mm YSO pixels, we clearly resolved most of the pixels in a 2-dimensional histogram with a peak-to-valley ratio of 2.9 for the 122-keV gamma photons. The energy resolution was 20.4 % FWHM. The spatial resolutions with a parallel hole collimator 2 mm from the collimator surface were 0.7- and 1.3-mm FWHM for the 122- and ~35-keV gamma photons, respectively. We successfully obtained phantoms and small animal images with our YSO gamma camera system.

Conclusion

Our high-resolution system has a potential to be useful for molecular imaging research.

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Author notes

  1. Hiroshi Watabe

    Present address: CYRIC, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiological and Medical Laboratory Sciences, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, 1-1-20 Daiko-Minami, Higashi-ku, Nagoya, 461-8673, Japan

    Seiichi Yamamoto & Katsuhiko Kato

  2. Department of Molecular Imaging, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Suita, Japan

    Hiroshi Watabe, Yasukazu Kanai & Jun Hatazawa

  3. Department of Nuclear Medicine and Tracer Kinetics, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Suita, Japan

    Jun Hatazawa

Authors
  1. Seiichi Yamamoto
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  2. Hiroshi Watabe
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  3. Yasukazu Kanai
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  4. Katsuhiko Kato
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  5. Jun Hatazawa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seiichi Yamamoto.

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Yamamoto, S., Watabe, H., Kanai, Y. et al. Development of a high-resolution YSO gamma camera system that employs 0.8-mm pixels. Ann Nucl Med 28, 232–240 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12149-013-0800-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12149-013-0800-y

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