Speaker
Description
The 100µPET project, led by the University of Geneva, the University of Luzern, and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, aims at the development of a small-animal positron emission tomography (PET) scanner with ultra-high-resolution molecular imaging capabilities.
This is achieved with compact and modular stacks of multiple thin monolithic pixel detectors bonded to flexible printed circuits (FPC) via flip-chip, thus resulting in unprecedented scanner depth-of-interaction and volumetric granularity.
Simulations performed with the Allpix$^2$ framework allowed the optimisation of the scanner sensitivity by analysing effects of different design choices such as, for example, the specifications of the Si layers and the impact of adding high-Z photon conversion layers, the thickness of the FPCs or cooling blocks. Simulations were also done to generate realistic scanner data for imaging reconstruction. Very large datasets with billions of events were produced with different source phantoms. A point-spread-function of 0.2 mm was found, free of parallax effect, resulting in a volumetric spatial resolution of ~ 0.015 mm$^3$ - one order of magnitude better than modern scanners.
The work developed within the Allpix$^2$ framework, including the PetAnalysis module and improvements for faster data generation, will be presented in this contribution.
