Towards a continuous crystal APD-based PET detector design

Bruyndonckx, Peter; Lemaître, Cédric; Schaart, Dennis R.; Maas, Marnix C.; Laan, D.J. van der; Krieguer, M.; Devroede, O.; Tavernier, S.

doi:10.1016/j.nima.2006.10.058

Cited by 57 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…In the case using two APD arrays coupled to both ends of the crystal, a 20-mm thick monolithic crystal detector offers good spatial resolution similar to 10-mm thick crystals with single front read out [59]. This approach also employs PS-APDs or SiPMs as alternative sensors to APD arrays [60,61].…”

Section: Continuous Doi Measurement By Single-ended Readoutmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positron emission tomography (PET) detectors with depth-of- interaction (DOI) capability

2011

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Because positron emission tomography (PET) provides biochemical information in vivo with the sensitivity at the sub-pico-molar level, pre-clinical research using PET plays an important role in biological and pharmaceutical sciences. However, small animal imaging by PET has been challenging with respect to spatial resolution and sensitivity due to the small volume of the imaging objects. A DOI-encoding technique allows for pre-clinical PET to simultaneously achieve high spatial resolution and high sensitivity. Thus many DOI-encoding methods have been proposed. In this paper we describe why DOI measurements are important, what is required in DOI-encoding designs, and how to extract DOI information in scintillator-based DOI detectors. Recently, there has been a growing interest in DOI measurements for TOF PET detectors to correct time walk as a function of DOI position. Thus, the DOI-encoding method with a high time performance suitable for TOF detectors is now required. The requirements to improve the time resolution in DOI detectors are discussed as well.Keywords Positron emission tomography (PET), Depth of interaction (DOI), Multi-layer detector, Dual-ended readout, Single-ended readout THE IMPORTANCE OF DOI MEASUREMENT Simultaneous improvement in spatial resolution and sensitivityThe PET is an important pre-clinical imaging technique because PET provides biochemical information down to the sub-pico-molar level in vivo [1]. Thus, the development of pre-clinical PET scanners has been actively promoted. The major focus of the development is to obtain a similar quality in small animal images as human images, while the size of the imaging subject decreases and the amount of radiopharmaceutical injected into the small animals is limitedTo obtain a similar level of detail and SNR in mouse images as human images, spatial resolution and sensitivity should be increased. That is why many PET instrument researchers have been attempting for the pre-clinical PET to simultaneously achieve high spatial resolution and high sensitivity. The pre-clinical PET systems therefore have been designed by using very long and narrow crystals with small diameter ring geometry. However, such system structures cause the parallax error to become lager when providing no depth-of-interaction (DOI) information within crystals (general PETs can measure no DOI information), and bring the degradation of the radial resolution in the peripheral field of view (FOV). That is because the reconstruction algorithm, when drawing a line of response (LOR) without DOI information, usually assigns the interaction positions over all depths within a crystal to a single position (i.e. the center position on the front of the interacted crystals).

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Section: Continuous Doi Measurement By Single-ended Readoutmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positron emission tomography (PET) detectors with depth-of- interaction (DOI) capability

2011

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“…While pixelated crystals are traditionally employed, the use of continuous crystals demonstrated increased sensitivity [1][2][3][4][5][6]. However, high intrinsic spatial resolution requires an accurate estimation of the g-ray position interaction within the crystal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a variety of methods for g-ray position interaction estimation: those based on analytical models [2], neural networks [3], statistical methods [4] or previous calibrations [6] among them. Some methods provide only the two coordinates at the surface of the detector.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High resolution detectors based on continuous crystals and SiPMs for small animal PET

Cabello

Barrillon

Barrio

et al. 2013

Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A:

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“…On the other hand, the use of monolithic detectors allows to obtain higher active volumes and higher efficiencies with spatial resolutions as good as those from pixelated detectors. Coincidence imaging is achieved by determining the point-of-entrance of the 511 keV photons over the surface of these monolithic detectors using neural networks (NN) algorithms which estimate the x and y surface coordinates based on a previous training process with known incidence positions [6]. Our proposed PET insert has external and internal diameters of 60 cm and 40 cm resp.…”

Section: Main Features Of the Brainpet Scannermentioning

confidence: 99%

A novel front-end chip for a human PET scanner based on monolithic detector blocks

Sarasola

Mendes²,

Cuerdo³

et al. 2011

J. Inst.

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We are developing a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner based on avalanche photodiodes (APD), monolithic LYSO:Ce scintillator crystals and a dedicated readout chip. All these components allow operation inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner with the aim of building a PET/MRI hybrid imaging system for clinical human brain studies. Previous work verified the functional performance of our first chip (VATA240) based on a leading edge comparator and the principle of operation of our radiation sensors, which are capable of providing reconstructed images of positron point sources with spatial resolutions of 2.1 mm FWHM. The new VATA241 chip presented in this work has been designed with the aim of reducing the coincidence window of our final PET scanner by implementing an on-chip constant fraction discriminator (CFD), as well as providing a better robustness for its implementation in the full-scale PET scanner. Results from the characterization of the VATA241 chip are presented, together with the first results on coincidence performance, validating the new design for our application.

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Towards a continuous crystal APD-based PET detector design

Cited by 57 publications

References 14 publications

Positron emission tomography (PET) detectors with depth-of- interaction (DOI) capability

Positron emission tomography (PET) detectors with depth-of- interaction (DOI) capability

High resolution detectors based on continuous crystals and SiPMs for small animal PET

A novel front-end chip for a human PET scanner based on monolithic detector blocks

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