Report on the MADEIRA PET probe

PET probes are showing a lot of promise in extending performance of the conventional PET ring. The underlying idea is to supplement basic PET data with information collected in the finely segmented probe placed close to the region of interest. The benefit is two fold: a) data collected near the object are less prone to errors related to scattering and acolinearity and b) the object itself is magnified in the proximity focus. The principle would be beneficial to clinical applications where spatial resolution below the current limit is required in a narrow field of view. The probe should therefore have excellent spatial resolution, should be compact and robust and should be able to handle large count rates of the clinical environments. Based on those we decided to explore devices with high-resistivity silicon as the sensitive material. They provide high spatial resolution, are compact and robust, and can handle the foreseen rates. We constructed a prototype, based on 1 mm thick silicon wafers, cut into 40 by 26 mm² detectors further segmented into 1 × 1 mm² square pads, effectively providing 1 mm³ sensitive voxels. For a module, two such detectors were placed in a back-to-back arrangement, providing filling factor in excess of 70 %. Stacking multiple modules is foreseen to compensate for low stopping power of silicon. The sensors are read out by 128 channel VATAGP7, GM-Ideas sourced application sensitive integrated circuit. Each module requires 16 chips, placed on 4 custom made PCB boards (hybrids) which are read independently. The modules were characterized and will be placed in a test PET ring. A simple point sources and phantoms will be imaged to confirm the predicted benefits.