MD-SiPM PET detector module design

Digital Silicon Photomultipliers have several advantages over their analog counterpart, such us lower after-pulsing probability, intrinsic digital conversion, reduction of system complexity, etc. In addition, multichannel digital silicon photomultipliers (MD-SiPMs) can achieve better time resolution and dark count rate immunity because of multiple time-to-digital converters on chip. In this work, we studied the influence of the MD-SiPM parameters on a small animal PET dectector module and on a PET scanner performance. Several aspect ratios of LYSO crystal scintillators were analyzed using GATE simulations with optical tracking. Moreover, we evaluated the coincidence resolving time for two light coupling conditions. In addition, coincidence count rates were studied for several readout-system dead-time specifications. The aim of this work is to find the optimum parameters for a small animal PET detector module, which is based on MD-SiPMs, in order to implement such a module.