Image Quality evaluation for 124I in the microPET Focus 120 scanner using the NEMA NU4-2008 phantom

Physical properties of iodine-124 such as its high positron energy, corresponding large positron range in tissue and the fraction of the single γ-photons emitted may have detrimental effects on the PET image quality. The purpose of this work was to evaluate the image quality for iodine-124 in the small animal microPET Focus 120 scanner using the NEMA NU4-2008 image quality phantom. Although the 2 ns timing window gives higher recovery coefficients and slightly lower spill-over ratios and combined with the 350-590 keV energy window gives the lowest spill-over ratio, the combination of the 350-650 keV and 6 ns windows seems to be the best compromise to obtain images with high contrast and low noise content.