TY - JOUR
T1 - A Study of inter-crystal scatter in small scintillator arrays designed for high resolution PET imaging
AU - Shao, Yiping
AU - Cherry, Simon R.
AU - Siegel, Stefan
AU - Silverman, Robert W.
N1 - Funding Information:
VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was supported by a grant from The Whitaker Foundation and NIH Training Grant T32-CA09092 (Y.S.).
PY - 1996
Y1 - 1996
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1109/23.507250
DO - 10.1109/23.507250
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0030167954
SN - 0018-9499
VL - 43
SP - 1938
EP - 1944
JO - IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science
JF - IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science
IS - 3 PART 2
ER -