Monolithic LYSO Scintillator Research Articles

Performance evaluation of the MOLECUBES β-CUBE—a high spatial resolution and high sensitivity small animal PET scanner utilizing monolithic LYSO scintillation detectors

The MOLECUBES β-CUBE scanner is the newest amongst commercially available preclinical PET scanners for dedicated small animal imaging. The scanner is compact, lightweight and utilizes a small footprint to facilitate bench-top imaging. It can be used individually, or in combination with the X-CUBE CT scanner, which provides the ability to perform all necessary PET data corrections and provide fully quantitative PET images. The PET detector comprises of an 8 mm thick monolithic LYSO scintillator read-out by an array of 3 mm × 3 mm Hamamatsu silicon photomultipliers. The monolithic scintillator provides the ability to measure depth-of-interaction which aids in the development of such a compact scanner. With a scanner diameter of 7.6 cm and axial length of 13 cm it is suitable for imaging both whole-body mice and rats. This paper presents the design and imaging performance of the β-CUBE scanner. NEMA NU4-2008 characterization and a variety of phantom and animal imaging studies to demonstrate the quantitative imaging performance of the PET scanner are presented. Spatial resolution of 1 mm is measured with a filtered-back projection reconstruction algorithm at the center of the scanner and DOI measurement helps maintain the excellent spatial resolution over the entire imaging FOV. An absolute peak sensitivity of 12.4% is measured with a 255–765 keV energy window. The scanner demonstrates good count-rate performance, with a peak NEC of 300 kcps and 160 kcps measured with ~900 µCi in the NEMA mouse and rat phantoms, respectively. Imaging data with the NEMA image quality phantom and Micro Derenzo phantoms demonstrate the ability to achieve good image quality and accurate quantitative data. Image uniformity of 7.4% and spill-over ratio of 8% were measured. The superior spatial resolution, excellent energy resolution and sensitivity also provide superior contrast recovery, with ~70% recovery for the 2 mm rods. While current commercial preclinical PET scanners have spatial resolution in the 1–2 mm range, the 1 mm3 volumetric resolution presents significant improvement over current commercially available preclinical PET scanners. In combination with the X-CUBE scanner it provides the ability to perform fully quantitative imaging with spatially co-registered high-resolution 3D PET-CT images.

A four-dimensional photon detector for PET application

We analyzed a photon detector for positron emission tomography with high spatial resolution and depth of interaction capability. The detector is composed of a monolithic LYSO scintillator crystal coupled on top and bottom sides to two custom SiPM arrays. We investigated the ability to reconstruct the DOI of the 511 keV photon comparing the number of triggered SiPMs on the two sides of the module. Acquisitions were performed scanning the lateral surface of the crystal with a collimated 511 keV photon beam at different incident positions. A standard deviation of 1.5 mm in depth of interaction was obtained at the center of the module.

3D photon impact determination in monolithic crystals based on autocorrelation filters and RTP methods.

In PET detectors based on monolithic scintillators, the photon impact position can be estimated from the light intensity distribution (LD) on the photodetector pixels. Typically, there is a poor estimation of the interaction positions towards the edges when linear algorithms such as Center of Gravity (CoG) are used. We present a novel method to determine the interaction coordinates in thick monolithic crystals filtering the digitized LDs from each gamma-event by means of an autocorrelation filter and the raise to power (RTP) positioning algorithm to reduce the border effects. The experimental setup was based on two detector blocks based on monolithic LYSO scintillator crystals (50x50x20 mm3). Each crystal is coupled to a SiPMs array as 12x12 photosensors and an electronic readout that outputs information of each SiPM row and column. Between the detector blocks, a collimated array of 9x9 22Na sources, separated 5 mm each other, was placed. The optimum power to use in the RTP positioning algorithm was determined using the third order intercept point (IP3) from plots of the measured coordinates versus known positions. After applying the autocorrelation and RTP fifth to the data, we found an improvement of the spatial resolution from 2.5 mm when CoG is used, to 1.2 mm in the crystal center region. In this work we show how to accurately resolve 3D photon impact coordinates in thick monolithic crystals using autocorrelation filters merged with RTP methods. After applying the new approach it is possible to accurately resolve impacts close to the entrance of 20 mm thick LYSO scintillators. The reached spatial resolution at any photon depth of interaction is comparable with state-of-the-art crystal array approaches with the advantage of the proposed work to also provide continuous depth of interaction information.

Detector block based on arrays of 144 SiPMs and monolithic scintillators: A performance study

We have developed a detector block composed by a monolithic LYSO scintillator coupled to a custom made 12×12 SiPMs array. The design is mainly focused to applications such as Positron Emission Tomography. The readout electronics is based on 3 identical and scalable Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). We have determined the main performance of the detector block namely spatial, energy, and time resolution but also the system capability to determine the photon depth of interaction, for different crystal surface treatments. Intrinsic detector spatial resolution values as good as 1.7mm FWHM and energies of 15% for black painted crystals were measured.

Multiplexing strategies for monolithic crystal PET detector modules

To reduce the number of output channels and associated cost in PET detectors, strategies to multiplex the signal channels have been investigated by several researchers. This work aims to find an optimal multiplexing strategy for detector modules consisting of a monolithic LYSO scintillator coupled to a 64-channel PMT.We apply simulated multiplexing strategies to measured data from two continuous miniature crystal element (cMiCE) detector modules. The strategies tested include standard methods such as row column summation and its variants, as well as new data-driven methods involving the principal components of measured data and variants of those components. The detector positioning resolution and bias are measured for each multiplexing strategy and the results are compared.The mean FWHM over the entire detector was 1.23 mm for no multiplexing (64 channels). Using 16 principal component channels yielded a mean FWHM resolution of 1.21 mm, while traditional row/column summation (16 channels) yielded 1.28 mm. Using 8 principal component output channels resulted in a resolution of 1.30 mm.Using the principal components of the calibration data to guide the multiplexing scheme appears to be a viable method for reducing the number of output data channels. Further study is needed to determine if the depth-of-interaction resolution can be preserved with this multiplexing scheme.