Hardware Design of a Dedicated Breast PET based on Curved LYSO Crystals Glued Together

Conventional Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners are usually built of multiple detectors arranged in a cylindrical geometry with both transaxial and axial gaps between them. These gaps decrease the system sensitivity and degrade the spatial resolution towards the edges of the detector blocks.To mitigate these constrains, we have designed and constructed a PET system based on 14 curved monolithic LYSO crystals. The crystals were glued together using a high refractive index material (n=1.7), and coupled to arrays of 12×12 SiPMs located in custom flexible Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). This approach eliminates the gaps in the transaxial axis and allows the light transmission between adjacent crystals.This contribution summarizes the design and the assembling process of the proposed system which is intended for breast imaging studies.