A Study of inter-crystal scatter in small scintillator arrays designed for high resolution PET imaging

Yiping Shao, Simon R. Cherry, Stefan Siegel, Robert W. Silverman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

108 Scopus citations

Abstract

Inter-crystal scatter causes mispositioning of scintillation events, which is of particular concern in imaging detectors based on small discrete scintillator elements. Because it is difficult to measure the scatter and its effects on detector intrinsic spatial resolution, a Monte Carlo simulation has been used to study inter-crystal scatter effects for evaluating and optimizing the design of a high resolution animal PET detector based on an array of small scintillator crystals. In this simulation, we quantitatively assess the mispositioning of events due to inter-crystal scatter as a function of parameters such as different scintillator materials, crystal geometry, γ ray incident angle and applied energy threshold. In analyzing the tradeoff between the detector efficiency and the position detection accuracy, we found that the mispositioning is not sensitive to the energy threshold, however it does change rapidly with the crystal length and the gap between crystals. We also compared four different crystal positioning algorithms to provide a theoretical estimate of positioning accuracy and to determine the best algorithm to use. To study how inter-crystal scatter affects detector spatial resolution, we analyzed the coincidence line spread function with and without intercrystal scatter and found that the inter-crystal scatter had very little effect on the FWHM and FWTM of the coincidence line spread function.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1938-1944
Number of pages7
JournalIEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science
Volume43
Issue number3 PART 2
DOIs
StatePublished - 1996

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics
  • Nuclear Energy and Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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