Accurate determination of the imaging properties of a high-spatial-resolution YAP camera.

Modern requirements of nuclear medicine, radiopharmacy, biology, etc., yielded the development of new high-quality imaging systems based on noninvasive position-sensitive gamma-ray detectors for in-vivo studies. Amongst the variety of the known scintillator cameras, the ones with Yttrium-Aluminum Perovskite doped with Cerium (YAP:Ce) turned out to be very promising [1]. In the present work we analyze the imaging properties of the YAP:Ce camera used for small animal imaging at PET laboratory of the National Laboratories of Legnaro, INFN, Italy [2]. We have developed and applied a method to determine the differential spatial resolution, the differential spatial linearity as well as the absolute spatial linearity in both X and Y directions of the Field Of View (FOV) of the camera. The differential values for the total spatial resolution and the linearity of the camera are derived from a deconvolution procedure, applied directly on the count distribution from selected narrow regions of the images.