New spherical PET design with fresnel aperture orientation

A new spherical PET using Fresnel aperture is being designed, and construction is in progress. In the new design, the original spherical geometry is modified to accommodate a more flexible gantry construction and data processing while preserving the focused geometry of the original design. The performance of this new Fresnel aperture‐SPET (F‐SPET) is expected to follow closely with that of the original S‐PET design. An analysis of an F‐SPET designed with nine modular layers, with each modular layer being four rings, was performed in terms of the counting statistics and solid angle and compared with the original S‐PET as well as the conventional cylindrical PET. According to the simulation results, the sensitivity gain of the Fresnel aperture‐SPET remains a factor of 2 over the equivalent cylindrical system and has nearly the same performance as the original S‐PET, while offering a simpler means in construction and data handling for the image reconstruction.