Spatial resolution limitations due to differences between positron emission position and annihilation detection localization

P. PEREZ; M. VALENTE

Porto Alegre

Congreso; 18th International Congress of Medical Physics; 2011

International association of medical physics

Since its successful implementation for clinical diagnostic, positron emission tomography represents the most promising medical imaging techniques. The recent great growth of PET imaging is mainly due to its capability to trace the biologic pathways of different compounds within patient, assuming patient can be radio labeled with some PET isotope. Disregarding the type of isotope, the PET imaging method is based the detection of two 511keV gamma photons being emitted at almost 180 degrees to each other as consequence of electron-positron annihilation. Therefore, this imaging method is intrinsically limited by random uncertainties in spatial resolutions related with differences between positron emission actual position and detected annihilation localization. This work presents a Monte Carlo approach for the study of the influence of this effect for different isotopes of potential implementation in PET.