The novel whole-body PET system based on plastic scintillators is developed by the {J-PET} Collaboration. It consists of plastic scintillator strips arranged axially in the form of a cylinder, allowing the cost-effective construction of the total-body PET. In order to determine properties of the scanner prototype and optimize its geometry, advanced computer simulations using the GATE software were performed. The spatial resolution, the sensitivity, the scatter fraction and the noise equivalent count rate were estimated according to the NEMA norm as a function of the length of the tomograph, number of the detection layers, diameter of the tomographic chamber and for various types of the applied readout. For the single-layer geometry with the diameter of 85 cm, strip length of 100 cm, cross-section of 4 mm x 20 mm and silicon photomultipliers with the additional layer of wavelength shifter as the readout, the spatial resolution (FWHM) in the centre of the scanner is equal to 3 mm (radial, tangential) and 6 mm (axial). For the analogous double-layer geometry with the same readout, diameter and scintillator length, with the strip cross-section of 7 mm x 20 mm, the NECR peak of 300 kcps was reached at 40 kBq/cc activity concentration, the scatter fraction is estimated to about 35% and the sensitivity at the centre amounts to 14.9 cps/kBq. Sensitivity profiles were also determined.
@article{arxiv.1808.00241,
title = {Estimating the NEMA characteristics of the J-PET tomograph using the GATE package},
author = {Paweł Kowalski and Wojciech Wiślicki and Roman Shopa and Lech Raczyński and Konrad Klimaszewski and Catalina Curceanu and Eryk Czerwiński and Kamil Dulski and Aleksander Gajos and Marek Gorgol and Neha Gupta-Sharma and Beatrix Hiesmayr and Bożena Jasińska and Łukasz Kapłon and Daria Kamińska and Grzegorz Korcyl and Tomasz Kozik and Wojciech Krzemień and Ewelina Kubicz and Muhsin Mohammed and Szymon Niedzwiecki and Marek Pałka and Monika Pawlik-Niedźwiecka and Juhi Raj and Kamil Rakoczy and Zbigniew Rudy and Sushil Sharma and Shivani Shivani and Michał Silarski and Magdalena Skurzok and Bożena Zgardzińska and Marcin Zielinski and Paweł Moskal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.00241},
year = {2018}
}