Modeling and simulation of positron emission mammography (PEM) based on double-sided CdTe strip detectors

Positron Emission Mammography (PEM) is a Positron Emission Tomography with different geometry to be used in detection of breast cancer. This scanner is able to detect milimeter-size tumors which is not able to achive with other imaging modalities. The detector has two heads are positioned in opposing fashion in a way to move parallely for a full scan, with a restricted field of view. In this thesis, a PEM scanner based on CdTe strip detectors is simulated via the Monte Carlo method and evaluated in terms of its spatial resolution, sensitivity, and image quality. The spatial resolution is defined as the width of the point spread functions (PSF) from the reconstructed image of compact radioactive source. Filtered back-projection (FBP) is used for both spatial resolution and image quality tests. As an alternative, Ordered-Subset Expectation Maximization (OSEM) algorithm which is an iterative method is used to compare the reconstructed images.