The Clearpet/XPAD

The development of combined PET/CT imaging systems led to a rapid expansion of this technique in clinical routine. Similarly, the development of dedicated PET scanners and micro-CT scanners for small animals pleads for joining these two modalities in a common gantry. However, like with clinical PET/CT, the juxtaposition of both modalities does not allow for extrapolating the exact position of the animal during the PET scan. For this, the ClearPET detectors developed within Crystal Clear were combined with the XPAD3 X-ray hybrid pixel detector developed at CPPM in a common rotating gantry. Both detection systems were merged together with an X-ray tube in a fully integrated PET/CT device that made possible to acquire simultaneous emission and transmission scans for mice. The PET axial FOV is 54 mm and its transverse FOV 110 mm. The CT components (an X-ray tube from RTW with 50 µm focal spot size and the 118 × 76 mm2 XPAD3 X-ray imager with 130 × 130 µm2 pixels) are positioned within the PET detector ring. The micro-CT modality has an axial FOV of 59 mm and a transverse FOV of 38 mm with a magnification by a factor 2. The X-ray cone beam passes through the shared FOV without irradiating the PET detectors directly. The design of the ClearPET/XAPD prototype has being studied using GATE. This work was supported by the ANR Programme « Chaire d'excellence 2005 » under grant No. ANR-05-CEXC-01 and by the Conseil Régional PACA. It was labelled in 2006 by the pole of competitiveness OPTITEC.

The layout of the ClearPET/XPAD dual-modality scanner mounted on a rotating gantry.

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