Abstract
Time of flight (TOF) and depth of interaction (DOI) capabilities can significantly enhance the quality and uniformity of positron emission tomography (PET) images. Many proposed TOF/DOI PET detectors require complex readout systems using additional photosensors, active cooling, or waveform sampling. This work describes a high performance, low complexity, room temperature TOF/DOI PET module. The module uses multiplexed timing channels to significantly reduce the electronic readout complexity of the PET detector while maintaining excellent timing, energy, and position resolution. DOI was determined using a two layer light sharing scintillation crystal array with a novel binary position sensitive network. A 20 mm effective thickness LYSO crystal array with four 3 mm × 3 mm silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) read out by a single timing channel, one energy channel and two position channels achieved a full width half maximum (FWHM) coincidence time resolution of 180 ± 2 ps with 10 mm of DOI resolution and 11% energy resolution. With sixteen 3 mm × 3 mm SiPMs read out by a single timing channel, one energy channel and four position channels a coincidence time resolution 204 ± 1 ps was achieved with 10 mm of DOI resolution and 15% energy resolution. The methods presented here could significantly simplify the construction of high performance TOF/DOI PET detectors.