Improving the performance of small planar detectors for dedicated PET instruments

Author

Zhang, Nan ; Thompson, Christopher J. ; Thompson, Charlie L. ; Nguyen, Khanh Q.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Biomed. Eng., McGill Univ., Montreal, Que., Canada

Volume

49

Issue

1

fYear

2002

fDate

2/1/2002 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

111

Lastpage

115

Abstract

Several dedicated PET instruments for small animal and breast imaging have recently been developed. Many of these use position-sensitive photomultiplier tubes (PS-PMTs) and pixelated crystals with depth encoding scheme to detect and localize gamma rays. Large area PS-PMTs show more distortion and have difficulty identifying crystal elements near their periphery. We have recently enhanced the bismuth germinate (BGO) detector modules used in the our positron emission mammography (PEM) and animal PET (ANIPET) systems by modifying the crossed anode readout resistor chain, applying a faster timing amplifier circuit, which takes the last dynode signal as event timing and adding a new image weighting function to improve the crystal identification. The PMTs field-of-view (FOV) have increased from 46 × 58 mm to 56 × 64 min and the timing resolution of system has improved from 12.0 to 8.7 ns

Keywords

amplifiers; biomedical electronics; biomedical equipment; bismuth compounds; gamma-ray detection; mammography; photomultipliers; position sensitive particle detectors; positron emission tomography; readout electronics; solid scintillation detectors; timing circuits; ANIPET; BGO; Bi₄Ge₃O₁₂; animal PET systems; bismuth germinate detector modules; breast imaging; crossed anode readout resistor chain; crystal identification; dedicated PET instruments; depth encoding scheme; distortion; dynode signal; event timing; gamma ray detection; image weighting function; pixelated crystals; position-sensitive photomultiplier tubes; positron emission mammography; small animal imaging; small planar detectors; timing amplifier circuit; timing resolution; Animals; Breast; Crystals; Detectors; Encoding; Instruments; Optical imaging; Photomultipliers; Positron emission tomography; Timing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9499

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TNS.2002.998690

Filename

998690