Speaker
Stefan Enrico Brunner
(Austrian Acadamy of Sciences)
Description
Advances in detector technology led to the construction of commercial time of flight (TOF) positron emission tomography (PET) devices, resulting in enhanced image contrast, lower patient's dose and shorter examination times. Commercial TOF-PET scanners with coincidence time resolutions of 500-600 ps FWHM are already available. Goal of this work is the improvement of time resolution for TOF-PET using Silicon photomultipliers (SiPM).
Along with many comparable features to ordinary vacuum photomultipliers, SiPM are considerably smaller in size and insensitive to magnetic fields, which makes them usable for hybrid devices such as PET-NMR. Their small size allows new detector geometries which may result in higher detection efficiency of scintillation photons, yielding improved time resolution for TOF.
For the development of a future TOF-PET prototype, Monte Carlo simulations using Geant4 have been started to optimize the detector parameters. Energy and time information of the photons arriving at the SiPM, as well as their creation process have been simulated. The results reveal that especially photons created by the Cherenkov effect are crucial for good timing as they arrive at the photodetector first.
In addition, the data was used to simulate the electronic output signals of SiPM, including the influence of amplifiers. The results will be used for optimization of electronics including dead time and improved efficiency regarding a future application in TOF-PET.
| quote your primary experiment | SiPM, TOF-PET |
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Author
Stefan Enrico Brunner
(Austrian Acadamy of Sciences)
Co-authors
Albert Hirtl
(Medical University of Vienna)
Johann Marton
(Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Mr
Ken Suzuki
(Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Lukas Gruber
(Austrian Academy of Sciences)
