Depth-of-interaction scintillation detectors

Abstract

The invention disclosed herein relates to a scintillation detector for registering the position of gamma photon interactions, an comprises an array of two or more elongated first and second scintillation crystal elements connected together along their respective long sides, and an array of discrete photosensitive areas disposed on a common substrate of a solid-state semiconductor photo-detector. The array of first and second scintillation crystal elements have proximal output windows optically coupled to the array of discrete photosensitive areas in a one-to-one relationship. The invention may be characterized in that the first and second scintillation crystal elements include a rooftop portion at their distal ends, wherein the rooftop portion optically couples one of the first and second scintillation crystal elements to the other and is configured to reflect and transmit light resulting from a gamma photon interaction from one of the first and second scintillation crystal elements to the other.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims the benefit of priority to U.S. Provisional Application No. 61 / 382,632 and U.S. Provisional Application No. 61 / 382,636, both filed on Sep. 14, 2010. Both priority applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties for all purposes.TECHNICAL FIELD[0002]The invention pertains to the field of imaging gamma ray detectors such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and, in particular, to scintillation detectors for registering not only the transverse coordinates of gamma quanta interactions within the crystalline material of the scintillator elements of the detector, but also their depth within individual scintillator elements (commonly referred to as Depth of Interaction (DOI)), which leads to improvement in spatial resolution of PET (or any other) imaging systems based on ring detector positions, especially at the periphery of the system's field of view.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0003]Positron emiss...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011]The present invention is related to scintillation detectors capable of detecting the position or depth of gamma photon interactions occurring within a scintillator. One of the embodiments of this invention comprises at least one pair of conjunct scintillation crystal bars, wherein each pair of conjunct scintillation crystal bars is composed of two individual scintillation crystal bars positioned in a side-by-side configuration, and connected along their long sides and optically isolated from each other and from the ambient environment on the four long sides. The remaining

Problems solved by technology

A number of methods have been so far proposed for addition of the DOI capability, however, most of them rely on additional detector electronics, thereby requiring considerably more complicated hardware and introducing numerous other issues (for example, gamma quant absorption in the front-facing electronics and increased dead space in the detector ring).

Dual photo-detector (PD) readout scintillation blocks cannot be packed as tightly as single PD read-outs resulting in dead spaces between blocks where gamma-quanta cannot be captured.

Besides, this scheme requires twice as many PD and other electronic components (as compared to single PD read-outs) thereby increasing production costs.

Although this approach allows rough DOI indexing, which improves the resolution of PET imaging, it

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