Design and prototyping of a human brain PET scanner based on monolithic scintillators

We are developing a PET insert for existing MRI equipment to be used in clinical PET/MR studies of the human brain. Previous results have demonstrated that our detector concept, based on monolithic scintillator crystals coupled to magnetically-compatible APD matrices with a dedicated ASIC front-end, is suitable for this application. In this work we present the final design of our PET scanner and report on the characterization of a prototype demonstrator used to validate the coincidence processing and data readout architecture.