Imaging performances of a small FoV gamma camera based on CRY018 scintillation crystal

Looking at the latest growth in the improvement of detectors for Nuclear Medicine imaging (i.e. PET and SPECT devices), the development and the characterization of new scintillation materials acquire an even important role. In this contest, a large number of new scintillation crystals have became available. The most important features required to these scintillators in order to obtain great images quality are the high light yield and energy resolutions, absence of hygroscopic nature and above all good imaging performances. The imaging requirements for a scintillator dedicated to SPECT applications are features like position linearity, intrinsic spatial resolution, integral uniformity, image contrast and signal to noise ratio. The proposed work is aimed to the investigation of the imaging performances of a recently developed scintillation crystal, named CRY018, for SPECT applications. The crystal has been show very promising characteristics as gamma ray imager, it can easily work as continuous detector allowing an energy resolution of 17% (@122 keV) and an intrinsic spatial resolution value of 1.2 mm (@122 keV photon energy) when coupled to a Position Sensitive PMT (this value is comparable to the one obtained for a LaBr3:Ce with the same experimental setup)