[en] Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) provide many advantages for PET detectors, such as their high internal gain, high photon detection efficiency and insensitivity to magnetic fields. The number of detectable scintillation photons of SiPMs, however, is limited by the number of microcells. Therefore, pulse height of PET detectors using SiPMs is saturated when large numbers of scintillation photons enter the SiPM pixels. On the other hand, we previously presented a depth-of-interaction (DOI) encoding method that is based on the light sharing method. Since our encoding method detects scintillation photons with multiple readout pixels, the saturation effect can be suppressed. We constructed two prototype four-layer DOI detectors using a SiPM array and evaluated their performances. The two prototype detectors consisted of four layers of a 6×6 array of Lu_2(1−x)Y_2xSiO₅ (LYSO) crystals and a SiPM (multi-pixel photon detector, MPPC, Hamamatsu Photonics K.K.) array of 4×4 pixels. The size of each LYSO crystal element was 1.46 mm×1.46 mm×4.5 mm and all surfaces of the crystal elements were chemically etched. We used two types of MPPCs. The first one had 3600 microcells and high photon detection efficiency (PDE). The other one had 14,400 microcells and lower PDE. In the evaluation experiment, all the crystals of the detector using the MPPC which had the high PDE were clearly identified. The respective energy and timing resolutions of lower than 15% and 1.0 ns were achieved for each crystal element. No saturation of output signals was observed in the 511 keV energy region due to suppression of the saturation effect by detecting scintillation photons with several MPPC pixels by the light sharing method. -- Highlights: •We constructed and evaluated four-layer DOI detectors by the light sharing method using a MPPC array. •The detectors using two types of the MPPC array were compared. •The energy and timing resolutions of lower than 15% and 1.0 ns were achieved for each crystal element. •The saturation effect was suppressed with the DOI detector using MPPC by the light sharing method

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[en] The optimum refiector arrangement to improve detector resolution at the peripheral part of the OpenPET detector was found. The next step is adjustment of the arrangement to the OpenPET electronics performance. (author)

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[en] One of the challenging applications of PET is implementing it for in-beam PET, which is an in situ monitoring method for charged particle therapy. For this purpose, we have previously proposed an open-type PET scanner, OpenPET. The original OpenPET had a physically opened field-of-view (FOV) between two detector rings through which irradiation beams pass. This dual-ring OpenPET (DROP) had a wide axial FOV including the gap. This geometry was not necessarily the most efficient for application to in-beam PET in which only a limited FOV around the irradiation field is required. Therefore, we have proposed a new single-ring OpenPET (SROP) geometry which can provide an accessible and observable open space with higher sensitivity and a reduced number of detectors than the DROP. The proposed geometry was a cylinder shape with its ends cut at a slant, in which the shape of each cut end became an ellipse. In this work, we developed and evaluated a small prototype of the SROP geometry for proof-of-concept. The SROP prototype was designed with 2 ellipse-shaped detector rings of 16 depth-of-interaction (DOI) detectors each. The DOI detectors consisted of 1024 GSOZ scintillator crystals which were arranged in 4 layers of 16×16 arrays, coupled to a 64-channel FP-PMT. Each ellipse-shaped detector ring had a major axis of 281.6 mm and a minor axis of 207.5 mm. For the slant mode, the rings were placed at a 45-deg slant from the axial direction and for the non-slant mode (used as a reference) they were at 90 deg from the axial direction with no gap. The system sensitivity measured from a ²²Na point source was 5.0% for the slant mode. The average spatial resolutions of major and minor axis directions were calculated as 3.8 mm FWHM and 4.9 mm FWHM, respectively for the slant mode. This difference resulted from the ellipsoidal ring geometry and the spatial resolution of the minor axis direction degraded by the parallax error. Comparison between the slant mode and the non-slant mode showed no remarkable difference in terms of the sensitivity distribution and spatial resolution performance. Therefore, we concluded that the SROP geometry has a good potential as an open geometry especially suitable for in-beam imaging

[en] Positron emission tomography (PET) has become a popular imaging method in metabolism, neuroscience, and molecular imaging. For dedicated human brain and small animal PET scanners, high spatial resolution is needed to visualize small objects. To improve the spatial resolution, we are developing the X’tal cube, which is our new PET detector to achieve isotropic 3D positioning detectability. We have shown that the X’tal cube can achieve 1 mm³ uniform crystal identification performance with the Anger-type calculation even at the block edges. We plan to develop the X’tal cube with even smaller 3D grids for sub-millimeter crystal identification. In this work, we investigate spatial resolution of a PET scanner based on the X’tal cube using Monte Carlo simulations for predicting resolution performance in smaller 3D grids. For spatial resolution evaluation, a point source emitting 511 keV photons was simulated by GATE for all physical processes involved in emission and interaction of positrons. We simulated two types of animal PET scanners. The first PET scanner had a detector ring 14.6 cm in diameter composed of 18 detectors. The second PET scanner had a detector ring 7.8 cm in diameter composed of 12 detectors. After the GATE simulations, we converted the interacting 3D position information to digitalized positions for realistic segmented crystals. We simulated several X’tal cubes with cubic crystals from (0.5 mm)³ to (2 mm)³ in size. Also, for evaluating the effect of DOI resolution, we simulated several X’tal cubes with crystal thickness from (0.5 mm)³ to (9 mm)³. We showed that sub-millimeter spatial resolution was possible using cubic crystals smaller than (1.0 mm)³ even with the assumed physical processes. Also, the weighted average spatial resolutions of both PET scanners with (0.5 mm)³ cubic crystals were 0.53 mm (14.6 cm ring diameter) and 0.48 mm (7.8 cm ring diameter). For the 7.8 cm ring diameter, spatial resolution with 0.5×0.5×1.0 mm³ crystals was improved 39% relative to the (1 mm)³ cubic crystals. On the other hand, spatial resolution with (0.5 mm)³ cubic crystals was improved 47% relative to the (1 mm)³ cubic crystals. The X’tal cube promises better spatial resolution for the 3D crystal block with isotropic resolution