High Resolution High Sensitivity Sensor for Radionuclide Imaging

Among the various functional imaging techniques, SPECT maintains an important and growing role in the study of disease models in small animals as well as in patient care. These applications require excellent spatial resolution, not only because of the small scale of the details to be imaged, but also for demanding detection and estimation tasks. Simultaneously, high sensitivity is also essential, as it is critically important for reducing image acquisition time, improving temporal resolution, increasing throughput for patient and animal studies, and reducing patient dose. While new developments in CCD/scintillator-based SPECT detectors have addressed the resolution issue by demonstrating sub-100 micron intrinsic spatial accuracies, a detector that can simultaneously provide high resolution and high sensitivity has not yet been realized. This is primarily due to the well-known efficiency-resolution tradeoff in current scintillators, and the parallax errors arising from oblique