Proposal of a Preclinical PET Prototype to support Pharmacology Studies

In the field of pharmacology research the preclinical image is an important tool to investigate drug biodistribution, pharmacokinetics and drug concentration delivered in the tissue (Pirovano et al 2019). In this perspective the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a nuclear image technique which uses radioactive drugs to study several biological process in vivo. Take this into account the original proposal presented in this work aimed to evaluate experimental characteristics to support the development of a preclinical image PET. The experiment involves comparing the performance of two crystal scintillators arrangements consisting of a conventional segmented crystal and an innovative monolithic crystal coupled to silicon photomultiplier as a sensor. Monolithic crystals promise better spatial resolution capability increasing the time to reconstruct the image. Therefore, with this study we intend to designate the most suitable crystal arrangement to be used in the first Brazilian preclinal PET prototype able to provide in vivo imaging of different sizes animals.