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Review
. 2023 Feb;33(1):4-12.
doi: 10.1016/j.zemedi.2022.08.004. Epub 2022 Oct 5.

Detectors in positron emission tomography

Artem Zatcepin  1 , Sibylle I Ziegler  2
Affiliations
Review

Detectors in positron emission tomography

Artem Zatcepin et al. Z Med Phys. 2023 Feb.

Abstract

Positron emission tomography is a highly sensitive molecular imaging modality, based on the coincident detection of annihilation photons after positron decay. The most used detector is based on dense, fast, and luminous scintillators read out by light sensors. This review covers the various detector concepts for clinical and preclinical systems.

Keywords: Avalanche photodiode; PET detectors; Photomultiplier tubes; Positron emission tomography (PET); Silicon photomultiplier.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Example of an array of small APDs, each with a sensitive area of 1.6 × 1.6 mm2. (Hamamatsu Photonics KK, Japan) .
Figure 2
Figure 2
Example of an SiPM with 1 × 1mm2 sensitive area with 20 × 20 individual APDs operated in Geiger mode (G-APD). Each cell outputs a standard pulse when hit by a photon. The number of “firing” cells is proportional to the number of detected scintillation photons .
Figure 3
Figure 3
Development of PET detector design .
Figure 4
Figure 4
Principle of the block detector. (A) A matrix of 8 × 8 crystals is read out by 4 PMTs using Anger-type crystal identification. (B) Flood map of one block showing the position of the 64 crystal elements. Modified from , .
Figure 5
Figure 5
Light distribution from an annihilation photon within a monolithic scintillator (left) and the corresponding flood map profiles (right) .
Figure 6
Figure 6
Detector parallax effect. The line-of-response on the right is mispositioned towards the field-of-view center (dashed line).
Figure 7
Figure 7
TOF-PET concept: By measuring the difference in arrival times the position of the annihilation event along the line-of-response can be determined (c: speed of light). Adapted from .
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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MeSH terms

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