Investigation of the Coincidence Resolving Time performance of a PET scanner based on liquid xenon: A Monte Carlo study

Abstract

The measurement of the time of flight of the two 511 keV gammas recorded in coincidence in a PET scanner provides an effective way of reducing the random background and therefore increases the scanner sensitivity, provided that the coincidence resolving time (CRT) of the gammas is sufficiently good. The best commercial PET-TOF system today (based in LYSO crystals and digital SiPMs), is the VEREOS of Philips, boasting a CRT of 316 ps (FWHM). In this paper we present a Monte Carlo investigation of the CRT performance of a PET scanner exploiting the scintillating properties of liquid xenon. We find that an excellent CRT of 70 ps (depending on the PDE of the sensor) can be obtained if the scanner is instrumented with silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) sensitive to the ultraviolet light emitted by xenon. Alternatively, a CRT of 160 ps can be obtained instrumenting the scanner with (much cheaper) blue-sensitive SiPMs coated with a suitable wavelength shifter. These results show the excellent time of flight capabilities of a PET device based in liquid xenon.

Accepted by JINST

References in corpus (4)

• Liquid noble gas detectors for low energy particle physics
• Characterization of Silicon Photomultipliers for nEXO
• Gamma Ray Spectroscopy with Scintillation Light in Liquid Xenon
• PETALO, a new concept for a Positron Emission TOF Apparatus based on Liquid xenOn

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Monte Carlo study of the Coincidence Resolving Time of a liquid xenon PET scanner, using Cherenkov radiation
• PETALO: a Time-of-Flight PET with liquid xenon
• Liquid xenon in nuclear medicine: state-of-the-art and the PETALO approach
• PETALO read-out: A novel approach for data acquisition systems in PET applications
• Status and perspectives of the PETALO project
• PETALO: Time-of-Flight PET with liquid xenon
• Monte Carlo characterization of PETALO, a full-body liquid xenon-based PET detector
• Evaluation of Coincidence Time Resolution in a liquid xenon detector with silicon photomultipliers