Open AccessScalable electronic readout design for a 100 ps coincidence time resolution TOF-PET system
Author(s) -
Shirin Pourashraf,
Andrea González-Montoro,
Jun Yeon Won,
Min Sun Lee,
Joshua Cates,
Zhixiang Zhao,
Jae Sung Lee,
Craig S. Levin
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
physics in medicine and biology/physics in medicine and biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.312
H-Index - 191
eISSN - 1361-6560
pISSN - 0031-9155
DOI - 10.1088/1361-6560/abf1bc
Subject(s) - silicon photomultiplier , detector , full width at half maximum , lyso , physics , jitter , optics , time of flight , scintillation , scintillator , coincidence , photomultiplier , time to digital converter , optoelectronics , electronic circuit , computer science , telecommunications , clock signal , medicine , alternative medicine , pathology , quantum mechanics
We have developed a scalable detector readout design for a 100 ps coincidence time resolution (CTR) time of flight (TOF) positron emission tomography (PET) detector technology. The basic scintillation detectors studied in this paper are based on 2 × 4 arrays of 3 × 3 × 10 mm 3 'fast-LGSO:Ce' scintillation crystals side-coupled to 6 × 4 arrays of 3 × 3 mm 2 silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). We employed a novel mixed-signal front-end electronic configuration and a low timing jitter Field Programming Gate Array-based time to digital converter for data acquisition. Using a 22 Na point source, >10 000 coincidence events were experimentally acquired for several SiPM bias voltages, leading edge time-pickoff thresholds, and timing channels. CTR of 102.03 ± 1.9 ps full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM) was achieved using single 3 × 3 × 10 mm 3 'fast-LGSO' crystal elements, wrapped in Teflon tape and side coupled to a linear array of 3 SiPMs. In addition, the measured average CTR was 113.4 ± 0.7 ps for the side-coupled 2 × 4 crystal array. The readout architecture presented in this work is designed to be scalable to large area module detectors with a goal to create the first TOF-PET system with 100 ps FWHM CTR.