Cited by 141Medical Imaging Techniques and ApplicationsRadiation Detection and Scintillator TechnologiesCardiac Imaging and Diagnostics

Performance evaluation of the MOLECUBES β -CUBE—a high spatial resolution and high sensitivity small animal PET scanner utilizing monolithic LYSO scintillation detectors

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Krishnamoorthy, Srilalan, Blankemeyer, Eric, Mollet, Pieter, Surti, Suleman, Van Holen, Roel, Karp, Joel S·2018·Physics in Medicine & Biology

Abstract

The MOLECUBES β -CUBE scanner is the newest amongst commercially available preclinical PET scanners for dedicated small animal imaging. The scanner is compact, lightweight and utilizes a small footprint to facilitate bench-top imaging. It can be used individually, or in combination with the X-CUBE CT scanner, which provides the ability to perform all necessary PET data corrections and provide fully quantitative PET images. The PET detector comprises of an 8 mm thick monolithic LYSO scintillator read-out by an array of 3 mm × 3 mm Hamamatsu silicon photomultipliers. The monolithic scintillator provides the ability to measure depth-of-interaction which aids in the development of such a compact scanner. With a scanner diameter of 7.6 cm and axial length of 13 cm it is suitable for imaging both whole-body mice and rats. This paper presents the design and imaging performance of the β -CUBE scanner. NEMA NU4-2008 characterization and a variety of phantom and animal imaging studies to demonstrate the quantitative imaging performance of the PET scanner are presented. Spatial resolution of 1 mm is measured with a filtered-back projection reconstruction algorithm at the center of the scanner and DOI measurement helps maintain the excellent spatial resolution over the entire imaging FOV. An absolute peak sensitivity of 12.4% is measured with a 255–765 keV energy window. The scanner demonstrates good count-rate performance, with a peak NEC of 300 kcps and 160 kcps measured with ~900 µ Ci in the NEMA mouse and rat phantoms, respectively. Imaging data with the NEMA image quality phantom and Micro Derenzo phantoms demonstrate the ability to achieve good image quality and accurate quantitative data. Image uniformity of 7.4% and spill-over ratio of 8% were measured. The superior spatial resolution, excellent energy resolution and sensitivity also provide superior contrast recovery, with ~70% recovery for the 2 mm rods. While current commercial preclinical PET scanners have spatial resolution in the 1–2 mm range, the 1 mm 3 volumetric resolution presents significant improvement over current commercially available preclinical PET scanners. In combination with the X-CUBE scanner it provides the ability to perform fully quantitative imaging with spatially co-registered high-resolution 3D PET-CT images.

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  • PET images were corrected for radionuclide decay, tissue attenuation, detector dead-time loss, and photon scatter.

    “In all cases, images were corrected for radionuclide decay, tissue attenuation, detector dead-time loss, and photon scatter according to the manufacturer’s methods (Krishnamoorthy et al., 2018).”

    From Plcg2M28L Interacts With High Fat/High Sugar Diet to Accelerate Alzheimer’s Disease-Relevant Phenotypes in Mice (2022) · cites this paper as Krishnamoorthy et al., 2018

    In Materials and Methods (NEMA NU-4 evaluation; page unavailable), the paper says CT data were used for PET attenuation and scatter corrections and that images were reconstructed with all available PET data corrections. Scanner Calibrations (page unavailable) describes a dead-time correction. Our copy does not explicitly identify radionuclide-decay correction or establish that the citing study applied every listed correction in all cases. (LLM, conf=0.86)

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Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Daube-Witherspoon ME & Muehllehner G 1987 Treatment of axial data in threedimensional PET. J Nucl Med, 28, 1717– 1724. 3499493

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Authors
Krishnamoorthy, S., Blankemeyer, E., Mollet, P., Surti, S., Van Holen, R., & Karp, J. S.
Affiliations
University of Pennsylvania (US)
Corresponding author
Krishnamoorthy, Srilalan
Venue
Physics in Medicine & Biology
Published
2018-07-27
Volume
63
Issue
15
Pages
155013
ISSN
  • 0031-9155 (ISSN-L)
  • 1361-6560
OpenAlex
W2810955814
Cited by
141
References
44
Citations by year
2026: 8 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 28 · 2020: 22 · 2019: 14 · 2018: 4
FWCI
11.75
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Physics in Medicine and Biology (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
Funders
National Institutes of Health (R01-CA113941)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Radiation › Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Cardiac Imaging and Diagnostics
Keywords
small animal imaging, silicon photomultipliers, spatial resolution, count rate performance, PET quantification, PET/CT, image quality, contrast recovery, rats and mice
MeSH terms
Animals, Scintillation Counting, Sensitivity and Specificity, Phantoms, Imaging, Positron-Emission Tomography, Mice, Rats

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