Evaluation of Algorithms for Photon Depth of Interaction Estimation for the TRIMAGE PET Component

The TRIMAGE consortium aims to develop a multimodal PET/MR/EEG brain scanner dedicated to the early diagnosis of schizophrenia and other mental health disorders. The TRIMAGE PET component features a full ring made of 18 detectors, each one consisting of twelve 8 ×8 Silicon PhotoMultipliers (SiPMs) tiles coupled to two segmented LYSO crystal matrices with staggered layers. The identification of the pixel where a photon interacted is performed on-line at the front-end level, thus allowing the FPGA board to emit fully digital event packets. This allows to increase the effective bandwidth, but imposes restrictions on the complexity of the algorithms to be implemented. In this work, two algorithms, whose implementation is feasible directly on an FPGA, are presented and evaluated. The first algorithm is driven by physical considerations, while the other consists in a two-class linear Support Vector Machine (SVM). The validation of the algorithm performance is carried out by using simulated data generated with the GAMOS Monte Carlo. The obtained results show that the achieved accuracy in layer identification is above 90% for both the proposed approaches. The feasibility of tagging and rejecting events that underwent multiple interactions within the detector is also discussed.