A portable device for small animal SPECT imaging in clinical gamma-cameras

Molecular imaging is reshaping clinical practice in the last decades, providing practitioners with non-invasive ways to obtain functional in-vivo information on a diversity of relevant biological processes. The use of molecular imaging techniques in preclinical research is equally beneficial, but spreads more slowly due to the difficulties to justify a costly investment dedicated only to animal scanning. An alternative for lowering the costs is to repurpose parts of old clinical scanners to build new preclinical ones. Following this trend, we have designed, built, and characterized the performance of a portable system that can be attached to a clinical gamma-camera to make a preclinical single photon emission computed tomography scanner. Our system offers an image quality comparable to commercial systems at a fraction of their cost, and can be used with any existing gamma-camera with just an adaptation of the reconstruction software.