A performance study of the next generation PET using a new histogramming method for the DOI detector

The next generation PET scanner named jPET-D4 is being carried out at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS) in Japan. At this stage, we plan to apply the reconstruction techniques after the histogramming of list-mode data because it is easy to implement and has low computational cost. The jPET-D4 has 4 layers DOI detectors and it can obtain true list-mode data. However, the conventional histogramming technique is inapplicable to 4 layer DOI detectors, so in this paper we propose a new histogramming method which is suitable for the multi-layer DOI detector. In this method, DOI-PET list-mode data is transformed into sinogram with an accurate system model of the crystal block. We also applied the method to simulated data for the JPET-D4 scanner. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed method reduces sampling error effectively while keeping the advantage of DOI information, and the image quality of JPET-D4 is superior to a conventional nonDOI PET scanner.