Depth of Interaction With a 3-Dimensional Checkerboard Arrangement LSO-LSO Block

In order to improve image quality in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) different routes are being pursued such as fast timing resolution for time-of-flight PET, higher spatial resolution by the use of smaller scintillator pixels and the use of depth-of-interaction information. The detection of the depth-of-interaction (DOI) of a gamma ray within a detector, deploying pulse shape discrimination (PSD), has been used to increase sensitivity and spatial resolution, especially at the edge of the field of view (FOV). The DOI information is used to reduce the parallax error; thus improving spatial resolution. Commonly, different scintillator materials with different decay times and light output and other differentiating factors, such as density, emission spectra, etc., are used for DOI detectors. We present a multilayer phoswich detector comprised of LSO with different decay times in the range from 30 ns to 47 ns. The difference in decay times is achieved by co-doping LSO:Ce with Ca, resulting in short decay times of ~30 ns. The use of a cut light guide allows the use of regular Photomultiplier tubes, giving the opportunity of a potential DOI detector replacement for current detectors. We were able to identify each pixel in the different detector layers and thus, to determine the depth of the photon interaction and achieve a timing resolution of 345 ps.