Design and Evaluation of a High-Performance Readout for Total-Body PET

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging is a non-invasive medical tool used to provide functional information of processes occurring within the patient body. Current PET instrumentation research aims to improve the sensitivity of such systems by increasing the axial coverage of the system (Total Body (TB) PET) and simultaneously achieving excellent time-of-flight (TOF) information of the photons arrival time to the detectors. If the photon impact coordinates including photon depth of interaction (DOI) information are provided, it is possible to mitigate the parallax error and thus, providing homogeneous spatial resolution in the entire field of view (FOV) of the system. Recent developments in gamma-ray detector technology made it possible to achieve either excellent DOI or TOF information but not both combined in a single detector. Moreover, this requires digitizing a large number of detector channels, which is not practical when building systems using large number of detectors such as in Total-body PET. In this work, we show preliminary results of a PET detector design suitable for TB-PET scanners. The readout architecture includes highly multiplexed electronics able to achieve temporal resolutions as good as 300 ps and accurate DOI capabilities using thick LYSO scintillators following the semi-monolithic geometry.