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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Contributions to the physical and experimental validation of a simultaneous PET/MRI system dedicated to small animal imaging

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description

Simultaneous PET/MRI is a dynamic research field of both medical and preclinical domains. The ability of integrated systems to acquire the highly complementarity MR morphological and PET functional data in a single examination paves the way to innovative applications. The hereby document presents a series of experimentations dealing with the performance evaluation and the experimental in vivo capacities of such a device. Physical measurements were implemented based on international standards or inspired by articles of reference. The evaluated system consists of a compact SiPM-based PET subsystem fully integrated in a 7 T preclinical MRI based on the dry magnet technology. Experimentations showed the high sensitivity and the high counting rates capability of the system. No major distortion of data was observed during simultaneous scans. The third part of the manuscript exposes the fine tuning of the system and its accessories. The extit{in vivo} experimentations performed during this work confirmed both the interest and compatibility of this prototype for several applications.