MollyQ-150™ Tentative Specifications

Scanner

Gamma Lens Detectors
Twelve, very large solid angle (f/1.6), 10cm thick, pointfocus lead collimators each coupled to a 13x20x2.5cm NaI crystal sensitive to high-energy gamma rays.

Sensitive Volume
A 20cm diameter cylinder within a large (29cm) opening to accommodate the head. The number of slices and slice spacing set by operator determines the sensitive volume length.

Slice Spacing (Bed Motion)
Selectable from zero to 20mm in 1mm steps. A single slice can be acquired at full sensitivity in as short as 20 seconds. Repeat fast scanning of a specified volume of interest is available for temporal studies.

Sensitivity
30,000 c/s/µCi/ml with high-sensitivity lens (288-hole collimator).

Reconstructed Transaxial Resolution
Three millimeter FWHM with the high-resolution lens (800-hole collimator) and adequate counts and contrast.

Physical
Total weight is 1600kg. Gantry is 2.6m high, 2.3m wide, and 0.8m deep. The bed extends forward 2.6m. Power required is less than 1.2 kW.

Gantry Electronics
Sixteen microcomputers consisting of one for master control, three for motion control (x-axis, y-axis and z-axis) and twelve for acquiring the raw data from the detectors.
Software

Multitasking
The MollyQ™-150 software supports internal multitasking. This allows a single application to perform "off-line" 3D reconstructions while acquiring data from the scanner, performing slice-by-slice (2D) reconstructions on the incoming data, and simultaneously viewing and analyzing prior studies.

Acquisition
The scan is initiated with the click of a button after selection of setup parameters. Quality control procedures and data acquisition are built into the application. The last 32 QC results are saved.

Reconstruction
There are two forms of reconstruction. Both use the same maximum a-posteriori (MAP) algorithm. The first reconstructs one slice at a time and is intended to provide real-time images to the operator while a scan is in progress. The second is an adaptive, fully 3-dimensional reconstruction providing the highest image quality both in terms of resolution and quantitation. The 3D reconstruction starts only after data from all slices are available and takes approximately 10 to 20 minutes depending on the number of slices acquired.

Display - Analysis
Multiple studies may be viewed concurrently in three orthogonal views using multiple color scales. The user can interact with the image volume to create arbitrary sets of slices along any direction with arbitrary spacing and size. Files exportable in industry standard formats.

Console Computer
The latest standard configuration hi-end Macintosh is included with the scanner. Presently, this 18+ Gflops workstation comes with dual 2.0 GHz PowerPC G5 vector processors, 2 GB SDRAM, a 120 GB hard drive, 1gb/s Ethernet, 4 USB and 2 FireWire ports and a flat 23 inch (1920x1200 pixel) Apple Cinema Display.