A method for measuring Time-of-Flight resolution of Positron Emission Tomography scanner

Time-of-Flight Positron Emission Tomography (TOF-PET) image reconstruction could significantly improve the overall image quality and robustness to inconsistent data corrections. The timing resolution of each PET scanner, which is directly related to the SNR gain in the reconstructed image, plays a key role in the system performance and image quality improvement. However, there is no consensus on how to measure the TOF resolution in the literature. In this paper, we propose a new method for measuring TOF resolution directly from a histogram of raw list-mode data without any calibration or reconstruction. The evaluation results from both GATE simulation and real scanner show that the proposed method could yield an accurate estimation of the TOF resolution of the system. Furthermore, the proposed method also provides the measurements of the intrinsic transverse and axial spatial resolutions without any calibration or reconstruction.