High Resolution 125I pinhole SPECT imaging of the mousethyroid with the MediSPECT small animal CdTe scanner

The first in vivo tomographic 125I imaging of the mouse thyroid carried out with the new MediSPECT small animal SPECT scanner is presented. The scanner is based on a fine pitch CdTe semiconductor pixel detector (14 × 14 mm2, 256 × 256 square pixel with a 55 m side) and equipped with a set of high resolution collimators. The collimation and detection units of the scanner are mounted on a gantry, rotating around a horizontal axis, along which is placed the small animal housing. In an in vivo test, the mouse was injected with a Na125 I solution having a total activity of 31.8 MBq. The planar projections for SPECT reconstruction were acquired with a 300 m pinhole (magnification 1.47 and field of view of 9.6 × 9.6 mm2). The projections were captured in a step-and-shoot fashion and were processed with an Ordered Subsets-Expectation Maximization reconstruction algorithm in order to obtain the SPECT images. Several 125I imaging tests have been made by using phantoms to assess the detector spatial resolution. The measured spatial resolution with a 300 m pinhole is about 0.5 mm in planar imaging and better than 1 mm in tomographic imaging.