F. Vittori et al., THE YAP CAMERA - AN ACCURATE GAMMA-CAMERA PARTICULARLY SUITABLE FOR NEW RADIOPHARMACEUTICALS RESEARCH, IEEE transactions on nuclear science, 44(1), 1997, pp. 47-53
The YAP Camera represents a refined research instrument in nuclear med
icine and pharmacology because of its overall detection efficiency com
parable to an Anger Camera and its submillimeter Intrinsic spatial res
olution, The YAP Camera consists of a YAP : Ce multicrystal matrix, wh
ose pillars dimensions are 0.6 mm x 0.6 mm x 10 mm, optically coupled
with a position sensitive PMT Hamamatsu R2486 and furnished with a par
allel hole lead collimator 20 mm thick with holes diameter of 0.5 mm a
nd septa of 0.15 mm, At this stage it is a miniature camera, with a fi
eld of view (FOV) of 40 mm x 40 mm and a total spatial resolution of 1
.0-1.2 mm, currently used for radiotracers studies on small biological
specimens, A detailed analysis of the detector position linearity and
energy responses are presented in this work, The intrinsic spatial re
solution is studied with three different single hole collimators (1.0,
0.3, and 0.2 mm), and a theoretical equation is presented, Three diff
erent parallel hole collimators are tested to evaluate the optimal hol
e and septa dimensions, Finally, it is demonstrated that two correctio
n procedures are capable of recovering the image spatial homogeneity a
nd of removing the statistical noise, Some phantom images show the imp
ortance of the small-field YAP Camera in the radiopharmacological rese
arch.