Abstract
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is important for accurate diagnosis of critical diseases. The quality of PET imaging highly depends on the performance of the detector module. In this study, we present a new method to design and assemble light-sharing block detectors which utilizes liquid instead of optical glass as a light guide. An integrated framework glued with Enhanced Specular Reflector (ESR) was built to hold the discrete crystals. A GATE-based simulation algorithm has been developed to optimize the heights of the reflectors for a good decoding accuracy. We fabricated a prototype block detector with a 12 × 12 array of LYSO scintillators and performed experiments to characterize the energy resolution and crystal decoding accuracy of the detector. The average energy resolution of the detector is 14.4% with a variance of 1.2%. The average peak-valley ratio of the profile is 3.95. The results show that it is possible to fabricate high performance PET detectors using the liquid light guide.
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