Comparison of coincidence identification techniques for high resolution PET

For increasing the resolution and sensitivity of a PET scanner one of the possible paths to follow consists in using low energy thresholds such that multiple events, specially triples, are present in the data. But if these events are going to be used for the image reconstruction, first, a good identification algorithm should be applied to the data. In this work we have focused in two commonly used sorting algorithms: those which use only a single time coincidence window opened at a time, SW, and those which use multiple simultaneous windows, MW. The investigated sorting methods are simple versions that use exclusively timestamps but do not take advantage of other possible information items, such as energy deposition and/or relative positions of the crystals.