Abstract
Positron emission tomography (PET) has a wide range of applications in the treatment and prevention of major diseases owing to its high sensitivity and excellent resolution. However, there is still much room for optimization in the readout circuit and fast pulse sampling to further improve the performance of the PET scanner. In this work, a LIGHTENING PET detector using a 13 × 13 lutetium-yttrium oxyorthosilicate (LYSO) crystal array read out by a 6 × 6 silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) array was developed. A novel sampling method, referred to as the dual time interval (DTI) method, is therefore proposed to realize digital acquisition of fast scintillation pulse. A semi-cut light guide was designed, which greatly improves the resolution of the edge region of the crystal array. The obtained flood histogram shown that all the 13 × 13 crystal pixels can be clearly discriminated. The optimum operating conditions for the detector were obtained by comparing the flood histogram quality under different experimental conditions. An average energy resolution (FWHM) of 14.3% and coincidence timing resolution (FWHM) of 972 ps were measured. The experimental results demonstrated that the LIGHTENING PET detector achieves extremely high resolution which is suitable for the development of a high performance time-of-flight PET scanner.
Highlights
Positron emission tomography (PET) has been pursuing better resolution and shorter imaging time due to its high application value in the early diagnosis of tumors, cardiac function assessments, nervous system analysis, etc. [1,2,3]
LIGHTENINGr PET basic detector module (BDM) is a detector module used for a small animal imaging scanner, as shown in Figure 1, which consists of four basic units, including the detector unit (DU), the multiplex circuit (MC), the digital acquisition and processing unit (DA&PU), and the data transmission unit (DTU)
We focus on describing the design and implementation of the DU, MC, DA&PU, and DTU, and reporting the performance properties measured of the LIGHTENINGr PET BDM
Summary
Positron emission tomography (PET) has been pursuing better resolution and shorter imaging time due to its high application value in the early diagnosis of tumors, cardiac function assessments, nervous system analysis, etc. [1,2,3]. Lutetium-yttrium oxyorthosilicate (LYSO), as an inorganic scintillation crystal material, has stable physical and chemical properties, is not deliquescent, and has high detection efficiency for gamma rays to sufficiently meet those requirements of a PET detector [23,24,25] Due to these prominent advantages, the SiPM array coupled with LYSO crystal system has gained an unprecedented upsurge of attention. SiPM arrays one-to-one coupled with crystals have been applied in PET detectors and obtained good time performances [26,27,28]. An SiPM array one-to-one coupled with an LYSO crystal will need more readout channels, which will seriously increase the burden of subsequent sampling circuits and system cost.
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