Development of a dedicated positron emission tomography system for the detection and biopsy of breast cancer

Dedicated positron emission mammography breast imaging systems have shown great promise for the detection of small, radiotracer-avid lesions. Our group (a collaboration consisting of West Virginia University, Jefferson Lab and the University of Washington) is extending this work by developing a positron emission mammography-tomography (PEM-PET) system for imaging and biopsy of breast lesions. The system will have four planar detector heads that will rotate about the breast to acquire multi-view data suitable for tomographic reconstruction. Each detector head will consist of a 96×72 array of 2×2×15 mm3 LYSO detector elements (pitch=2.1 mm) mounted on a 3×4 array of 5×5 cm2 flat panel position-sensitive photomultiplier tubes. PEM-PET is expected to have approximately two-millimeter resolution and possess the ability to guide the needle biopsy of suspicious lesions seen on the PET images. Initial tests of the scintillator arrays yielded excellent results. Pixel maps for all four scintillator arrays demonstrated that separation of the LYSO elements was very good; all of the LYSO array elements were observed, even in areas between individual PSPMTs. System energy resolution was measured to be 25% FWHM at 511 keV. Future work includes the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to replace the current VME-based data acquisition system, a PSPMT gain normalization procedure to help improve response uniformity and energy resolution, and the addition of an x-ray source and detector to produce multi-modality PEM-PET-CT images of the breast.