A TOF-PET prototype with position sensitive PMT readout

A prototype of time-of-flight positron emission computed tomography (TOF-PET) has been developed for acquiring the coincident detection of 511 keV γ-rays produced from positron annihilation. It consists of two 80.5 mm x 80.5 mm LYSO scintillator arrays (composed of 35 x 35 pixel finger crystals) with the position sensitive photomultiplier tubes R2487 as the readout.Each array is composed of 2 mm x 2 mm x 15 mm finger crystals and the average pixel pitch is 2.30 mm. The measured results indicate that the TOF information has the potential to significantly enhance the image quality by improving the noise variance in the image reconstruction. The best spatial resolution (FWHM) of the prototype for the pairs of 511 keV γ-rays is 1.98 mm and 2.16 mm in the x and y directions, respectively, which are smaller than the average pixel pitch of 2.30 mm. (authors)