A slanting light-guide analog decoding high resolution detector for positron emission tomography camera

Current high resolution PET cameras require the scintillation crystals to be much narrower than the smallest available photomultipliers. In addition, the large number of photomultiplier channels constitutes the major component cost in the camera. Recent new designs use the Anger camera type of analog decoding method to obtain higher resolution and lower cost by using the relatively large photomultipliers. An alternative approach to improve the resolution and cost factors has been proposed, with a system of slanting light-guides between the scintillators and the photomultipliers. In the Anger camera schemes, the scintillation light is distributed to several neighboring photomultipliers which then determine the scintillation location. In the slanting light-guide design, the scintillation is metered and channeled to only two photomultipliers for the decision making. This paper presents the feasibility and performance achievable with the slanting light-guide detectors. With a crystal/photomultiplier ratio of 6/1, the intrinsic resolution was found to be 4.0 mm using the first non-optimized prototype light-guides on BGO crystals. The axial resolution will be about 5-6 mm