Development of scintillation materials for PET scanners

The growing demand on PET methodology for a variety of applications ranging from clinical use to fundamental studies triggers research and development of PET scanners providing better spatial resolution and sensitivity. These efforts are primarily focused on the development of advanced PET detector solutions and on the developments of new scintillation materials as well. However Lu containing scintillation materials introduced in the last century such as LSO, LYSO, LuAP, LuYAP crystals still remain the best PET species in spite of the recent developments of bright, fast but relatively low density lanthanum bromide scintillators. At the same time Lu based materials have several drawbacks which are high temperature of crystallization and relatively high cost compared to alkali-halide scintillation materials. Here we describe recent results in the development of new scintillation materials for PET application.