Small animal single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is a nuclear medicine imaging technique that plays an important role in molecular imaging. SPECT systems using pinhole or multi-pinhole collimator can achieve submillimetric spatial resolution and high sensitivity in a small field of view, which is particularly appropriate for imaging mice. In our work, we studied a new collimator dedicated to small animal SPECT, in the context of a project called SIGAHRS, led by the Biospace company. In this collimator, focal lengths vary spatially in the transaxial plane and are fixed in the axial plane. This design aims at achieving high spatial resolution in the center of the field of view, with a large field of view and high sensitivity. Using Monte Carlo simulations, where all parameters can be controlled, we studied this new collimator geometry and compared it to a parallel collimator and a cone-beam collimator. To speed up the simulations, we developed a multi-CPU/GPU module that uses a technique of ray tracing. Using this approach, the acceleration factor was ~ 60 and we restored ~ 90 % of the signal for ⁹⁹^mTc (140.5 keV emission), compared to a classical Monte Carlo simulation. The 10 % difference is due to the fact that the multi-CPU/GPU module neglects the septal penetration and scatter in the collimator. We demonstrated that the data acquired with the new collimator could be reconstructed without artifact using an OSEM algorithm. We developed four forward projectors (simple projector (S-RT), projector accounting for the surface of the detecting pixel (S-RT-IV), projection modeling the solid angle (S-RT-SA) of the projection tube, and projector modeling the depth of interaction (S-RT-SA-D)). We also modeled the point spread function of the collimator in the image domain, using an anisotropic non-stationary function. To characterize the reconstruction, we studied the conditioning number of the system matrix for each projector and each collimator. We showed that the new collimator was more ill-conditioned than a parallel collimator or a cone-beam collimator. We showed that the image based PSF and the modeling of the depth of interaction improved the quality of the images, but edge artefacts were introduced when modeling the PSF in the image domain. Compared to existing systems, we showed that this new collimator has a large field of view (~ 70 mm in the transaxial plane) with a resolution of 1.0 mm in the best case but suffers from a relatively low sensitivity (1.32x10⁻² %).
