Towards the development of new scintillation detectors for the next generation PET systems

Abstract

  In PET systems, the scheme and characteristics of detectors largely affect the system performance, where most PET detectors are composed of scintillation crystals and photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). According to the increasing interest in high resolution PET systems for small animal studies and time-of-flight (TOF) PET systems for clinical studies, the detector performance has been dramatically improved and new detectors including solid state detectors have been developed. Recent advancement in photo-detectors for PET and a new trial of scintillation crystal process with laser engraving technique are introduced in this paper.