An innovative detector concept for hybrid 4D-PET/MRI imaging

The importance of a high-quality hybrid imaging, providing morphological and functional information with only one acquisition session, is widely acknowledged by the scientific community. The historical limitations to the quality of PET images are related to the unsatisfactory measurement of the depth of interaction (DOI) in the crystals and of the time of flight (TOF), that cause a parallax error and an unfavorable signal to background condition in the image reconstruction process, respectively. The 4DMPET project is developing a high performance PET block-detector featuring 4D image reconstruction capabilities. The detector module is based on a fast scintillating continuous crystal coupled on both sides to arrays of Silicon PhotoMultipliers (SiPM). The SiPMs collect the scintillation light and provide the trigger signal, the time and the energy released in the crystal at the pixel level. The photon depth of interaction (DOI) is reconstructed by measuring the cluster size asymmetry on the two faces of the crystal, thus obtaining a comparable spatial resolution in the three coordinates and removing the parallax error. The event position along the line of response can be measured with high precision by means of TOF techniques. We discuss the module design concept and the results of the detailed Monte Carlo detector simulation, which inspire the architectural solutions selected for the layout and the front-end The expected resolution for 3D spatial coordinates of the interaction point in the crystal (1 mm) and the TOF (about 110 ps) would provide a substantial improvement of the image quality. 4DMPET aims at building a prototype block detector demonstrating that the proposed layout meets the expected performance and is suitable for designing a detector focused on a specific application.