Modeling brain-dedicated PET systems using metascintillators for
optimized ToF capability
Abstract
Recent trends in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) use the
time-of-flight (ToF) information in the image reconstruction process to
improve the signal-to-noise ratio and the positioning of the
annihilation event. One of the components that most contributes to the
accuracy of the ToF-PET is the scintillation crystal. The
metascintillator approach has been proposed to overcome the time
resolution limits of commonly used scintillators. The metascintillator
is an engineered composition of small units that combines and optimizes
several features in a single scintillator heterostructure. In this work,
metascintillator-based brain PET systems were modeled using the GATE
Monte Carlo toolkit and compared with designs based on bulk LYSO or BGO.
Sensitivity, noise equivalent count rate and scatter fraction were
evaluated following the NEMA guidelines. Only data in the list mode
format was used for comparison purposes to avoid dependence on the image
reconstruction algorithm. To achieve the same peak sensitivity of a
system based on a 15 mm thick bulk BGO, the metascintillator-based
scanners using BGO/BaF2 , BGO/EJ232, LYSO/BaF2 and LYSO/EJ232 must have
thicknesses of 23.2 mm, 22.5 mm, 29.7 mm and 31.1 mm, respectively. The
objective of this work is to determine the clinical value of using
metascintillator-based detectors in brain PET.