Towards a continuous crystal APD-based PET detector design

Monolithic scintillator blocks provide an efficient way to significantly increase the sensitivity of high-resolution positron emission tomography (PET) systems. Using statistical or neural network-based positioning schemes, the measured intrinsic detector resolution for perpendicular incident photons is 1.7 mm full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) for 10 mm thick LSO blocks and 2.0 mm FWHM for 20 mm thick LSO blocks. Because the positioning algorithms determine the incidence position as opposed to the combination of interaction position and interaction depth, a very good parallax correction can be achieved. Energy and detector time resolution were 11.5% FWHM and 1.6 ns FWHM, respectively.