Abstract
Maintaining excellent timing resolution in time-of-flight positron emission tomography (TOF-PET) at system scale requires an enormous amount of high speed, high bandwidth electronic channels and components. Therefore, to minimize cost and complexity of a system's back-end architecture and data acquisition, many analog signals are multiplexed to a fewer channels using techniques that encode timing, energy, and position information. With progress in the development silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) having lower dark noise, after pulsing, and cross talk along with higher photodetection efficiency, a coincidence timing resolution (CTR) well below 200 ps FWHM is now easily achievable using single pixels of 20 mm long, lutetium-based inorganic scintillators. However, multiplexing many SiPMs channels to a readout will unavoidably degrade CTR. This work investigates the trade-offs between high analog multiplexing ratios and achievable CTR. Using information gained from test boards that multiplex many channels, a prototype detector read-out comprising a 4×4 array of SiPMs with a 16:2 multiplexing ratio (one channel for timing, one for energy and position information) is presented.
Published Version
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