Towards a multi-channel TOF-PET system with SiPM readout

The goal of this project is to develop a multi-channel TOF-PET system with a 300 ps FWHM time resolution, a factor two improvement with respect to commercially available systems (Surti et al., 2007 [1]). In a TOF-PET system, the time-of-flight information can be used to improve significantly the sensitivity of the detector as shown in Karp et al. (2008) [2]. The target time resolution has been achieved in two channel systems with LYSO (Kim and Wang, 2008 [3]), the aim is to port this results into a multi-channel system. This work extends the results shown in Göttlich et al. (2010) [4], studying the stability of the detector performance in different geometries and configurations.