Evaluation of signal energy calculation methods for a light-sharing SiPM-based PET detector

Signals of a light-sharing positron emission tomography (PET) detector are commonly multiplexed to three analog pulses (E, X, and Y) and then digitally sampled. From this procedure, the signal energy that are critical to detector performance are obtained. In this paper, different signal energy calculation strategies for a self-developed SiPM-based PET detector, including pulse height and different integration methods, are evaluated in terms of energy resolution and spread of the crystal response in the flood histogram using a root-mean-squared (RMS) index. Results show that integrations outperform the pulse height. Integration using the maximum derivative value of the pulse E as the landmark point and 28 integrated points (448 ns) has the best performance in these evaluated methods for our detector. Detector performance in terms of energy and position is improved with this integration method. The proposed methodology is expected to be applicable for other light-sharing PET detectors.