Potential advantages of digitally sampling scintillation pulses in timing determination in PET

We investigate the use of digital signal processing (DSP) techniques for event processing in positron emission tomography (PET). In this work, we focus on the determination of the event time. We are building a digital library of pulse waveforms generated by using different photo-detectors, scintillator materials, crystal sizes, and read-out electronics of interest in PET. We employ a dataset from our library and investigate two methods for obtaining digital samples of an event pulse and several DSP algorithms for estimating the event time. Our first results, by using non-optimized DSP methods, are encouraging.