Laparoscopic and robotic gastrectomy had overall complication and mortality rates similar to those of open surgery, but anastomotic leaks were more common with the minimally invasive techniques.

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PET imaging can be used to verify dose distributions of therapeutic particle beams such as carbon ion beams. The purpose of this study was to develop a PET detector module which was designed for an in-beam PET scanner geometry integrated into a carbon beam therapy system, and to evaluate its feasibility as a monitoring system of patient dose distribution. A C-shaped PET geometry was proposed to avoid blockage of the carbon beam by the detector modules. The proposed PET system consisted of 14 detector modules forming a bore with 30.2 cm inner diameter for brain imaging. Each detector module is composed of a 9 × 9 array of 4.0 mm × 4.0 mm × 20.0 mm LYSO crystal module optically coupled with four 29 mm diameter PMTs using Photomultiplier-quadrant-sharing (PQS) technique. Because the crystal pixel was identified based upon the distribution of scintillation lights of four PMTs, the design of the reflector between crystal elements should be well optimized. The optical design of reflectors was optimized using DETECT2000, a Monte Carlo code for light photon transport. A laser-cut reflector set was developed using the Enhanced Specular Reflector (ESR, 3M Co.) mirror-film with a high reflectance of 98% and a thickness of 0.064 mm. All 81 crystal elements of detector module were identified. Our result demonstrates that the C-shaped PET system is under development and we present the first reconstructed image.

A large-angle gamma camera was developed for imaging small animal models used in medical and biological research. The simulation study shows that a large field of view (FOV) system provides higher sensitivity with respect to a typical pinhole gamma cameras by reducing the distance between the pinhole and the object. However, this gamma camera suffers from the degradation of the spatial resolution at the periphery region due to parallax error by obliquely incident photons. We propose a new method to measure the depth of interaction (DOI) using three layers of monolithic scintillators to reduce the parallax error. The detector module consists of three layers of monolithic CsI(Tl) crystals with dimensions of 50.0×50.0×2.0 mm 3 , a Hamamatsu H8500 PSPMT and a large-angle pinhole collimator with an acceptance angle of 120 • . The 3-dimensional event positions were determined by the maximum-likelihood position-estimation (MLPE) algorithm and the pre-generated look up table (LUT). The spatial resolution (FWHM) of a Co-57 point-like source was measured at different source position with the conventional method (Anger logic) and with DOI information. We proved that high sensitivity can be achieved without degradation of spatial resolution using a large-angle pinhole gamma camera: this system can be used as a small animal imaging tool. KEYWORDS: Gamma camera, SPECT, PET PET/CT, coronary CT angiography (CTA); Image reconstruction in medical imaging; Front-end electronics for detector readout; Detector modelling and simulations I (interaction of radiation with matter, interaction of photons with matter, interaction of hadrons with matter, etc)