Design study of a high-resolution breast-dedicated PET system built from cadmium zinc telluride detectors

We are developing a dual-panel cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) detector positron emission tomography (PET) system dedicated to breast imaging. The proposed system consists of two 4 cm thick 12× 15 cm2 area CZT panels with adjustable separation, which can be put in close-proximity to breasts and/or axillary nodes and results in high photon sensitivity. In this project, the performance of the proposed CZT dual panel PET system was investigated using Monte-Carlo simulation. Expected system performance is predicted due to CZT's superior energy resolution, the high photon sensitivity, and the uniform spatial resolution throughout field-of-view (FOV). The dependency of system reconstructed resolution on depth-of-interaction (DOI) resolution was also studied.