Mark J. Hamamura1, Seung Hoon Ha1, Werner W. Roeck1, Orhan Nalcioglu1, Douglass J. Wagenaar2, Dirk Meier2, Bradley E. Patt2
1Center for Functional Onco-Imaging, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA; 2Gamma Medica-Ideas, Inc., Northridge, CA, USA
We experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of operating a SPECT system inside a 4T MR system for simultaneous data acquisition. In the present study we investi-gated the mutual interference of MR and SPECT during simultaneous data acquisition and shown that the system presented here is capable of acquiring spatially and temporally co-registered images by both modalities without any artifacts. It is our belief that the availability of such system will open up new opportunities in molecular imaging that can also be translated to humans by scaling up the current design appropriately.