A PET system design by using mixed detectors: resolution properties.

We investigate a cylindrical positron emission tomography (PET) system design strategy that employs two groups of detectors with different resolutions. The reason for considering this strategy is the observation that in many tasks one would want a higher resolution in a targeted region, which contains lesions or organs of interest, than that in the rest of the subject. Although one can design a PET system to meet the highest resolution required by the imaging task, this is not cost efficient because the superior resolution outside the target region is not needed.