Study of the characteristics of a scintillation array and single pixels for nuclear medicine imaging applications

By using a pixelized Nal (Tl) crystal array coupled to a R2486 PSPMT, the characteristics of the array and of a single pixel, such as the light output, energy resolution, peak-to-valley ratio (P/V) and imaging performance of the detector were studied. The pixel size of the NaI(TI) scintillation pixel array is 2 mm x 2 mm x 5 mm. There are in total 484 pixels in a 22 x 22 matrix. In the pixel spectrum an average peak-to-valley ratio (P/V) of 16 was obtained. In the image of all the pixels, good values for the Peak-to- Valley ratios could be achieved, namely a mean of 17, a maximum of 45 and the average peak FWHM (the average value of intrinsic spatial resolution) of 2.3 mm. However, the PSPMT non-uniform response and the scintillation pixels array inhomogeneities degrade the imaging performance of the detector. (authors)