Advances in small animal imaging systems

The rapid growth in genetics and molecular biology combined with the development of techniques for genetically engineering small animals has led during the past few years to an increased interest in in vivo laboratory animal imaging. For this purpose, new instrumentation, data acquisition strategies, and image processing and reconstruction techniques are being developed, researched and evaluated. The aim of this lecture is to cover the state of art technologies for high resolution and high sensitivity molecular imaging techniques, primarily positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission tomography (SPET). The basic needs of small animal imaging will be described. The evolution in instrumentation the past two decades, as well as the commercially available systems will be overviewed. Finally, the new trends in detector technology and preliminary results from challenging applications will be presented.