CdZnTe detectors for small field of view positron emission tomographic imaging

We report the timing performance between two 16×20×0.9 mm3 cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) detectors equipped with a specific orthogonal electrode geometry (16 anodes and 5 cathodes with 1 and 4 mm pitch, respectively) and a dedicated electronic setup for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) application. The measured coincidence times reach 2.6 ns full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) for a 500 V bias voltage and 300 keV energy threshold. Subsequently, a simulation study was carried out to assess the spatial and efficiency performances of these detectors, which allow the depth of interaction (DOI) measurement and so limit the parallax error. Preliminary results show that the proposed design could reach a better homogeneity of the spatial resolution across the field of view than what is achieved with the standard PET scintillation.