Patent ID: 7381960

Claim:
An imaging system for non-pure positron emission tomography (NPET), comprising: a detector ring divided into four areas, two of said four areas being positron emission tomography (PET) areas facing each other and the other two areas being single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) areas; a cylindrical pinhole collimator located near the center of said detector ring, said cylindrical pinhole collimator having four sections with two of said four sections being PET sections corresponding to and facing said PET areas, and the other two sections being SPECT sections corresponding to and facing said SPECT areas; and a triple coincidence circuit connected to said detector ring; wherein said two PET sections of said cylindrical pinhole collimator are empty to allow annihilated photons emitted from a point source located inside said cylindrical pinhole collimator to go through, said two SPECT sections of said cylindrical pinhole collimator comprise multiple pinholes to collimate associated photons emitted from said point source, and said triple coincidence circuit detects and processes triple coincidence data of two annihilated photons and an associated photon emitted from said point source.