Evaluation of Photon Processing Detectors using the Fourier Crosstalk Matrix

Advances in emission imaging detector hard-ware and modeling have allowed on-the-fly maximum likelihood photon event attribute estimation [1]. Such detectors lead to an infinite d imensional s ystem m odel c alled the Photon Processing model [2], [3], [4]. In this work we extend the Fourier crosstalk matrix formalism [5] to photon processing systems to compare the performance of such detectors to classical pixelated photon-counting detectors for the task of estimating object Fourier coefficients. In a preliminary study we have computed crosstalk matrices for a class of 2D pinhole SPECT systems; in this setting, the photon processing detector outperforms a pixelated detector with pixel size equal to the full width half maximum of the position estimation blur.