Over the past three decades, many multiple-detector, tomographic nuclear-medicine imaging systems have been developed and deployed clinically. These systems are always built around a single detector technology that is duplicated and surrounds the patient. The choice of detector technology in nuclear medicine is one of considering the tradeoffs between 2D spatial resolution, energy resolution, stopping power, detector area, count-rate capability, depth-of-interaction resolution, and sensitivity. No single detector type has emerged that achieves high performance in all of these categories. In this paper, we derive observer-performance metrics for imaging systems that utilize combinations of two or more detector technologies and show that it is mathematically possible to achieve improved observer performance when the varying detector technologies used have disparate strengths and weaknesses.
|