[Specified systems of high spatial resolution for tomographic gamma cameras; their applications and studies in...

Imaging with nuclear medicine planar and tomographic gamma cameras, offers information about the function of an organ, the detection and the delineation of a lesion. However, the basic limitations of these cameras are low statistics, the significant noise (background), the relatively low spatial resolution and low sensitivity. Moreover, commercially available systems are large, since they are constructed for general clinical use only and so, small organs such as brain, heart, breast, prostate etc cannot be efficiently imaged. For these reasons a number of dedicated imaging systems have been developed, based on modifications of the existing technology or on novel technology. One important limitation in using such systems routinely is their high cost. The most important applications of these new systems are focused on imaging small animals or small human organs, on scintimammography, on sentinel node detection and for the evaluation of new radiopharmaceuticals. In the present work, the principles of operation of these dedicated SPET imaging systems, results from clinical trials and present Greek studies, are presented.