Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
1823348 | Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment | 2013 | 7 Pages |
Abstract
A silicon photomultiplier (Si-PM) is a promising photodetector for high resolution PET systems due to its small channel size and high gain. Using Si-PMs, it will be possible to develop a high resolution imaging systems. For this purpose, we developed a small field-of-view (FOV) ultrahigh-resolution Si-PM-based dual-head coincidence imaging system for small animals and plant research. A new scintillator, Ce doped Gd3Al12Ga3O12 (GAGG), was selected because of its high light output and its emission wavelength matched with the Si-PM arrays and contained no radioactivity. Each coincidence imaging block detector consists of 0.5Ã0.5Ã5Â mm3 GAGG pixels combined with a 0.1-mm thick reflector to form a 20Ã17 matrix that was optically coupled to a Si-PM array (Hamamatsu MPPC S11064-050P) with a 1.5-mm thick light guide. The GAGG block size was 12.0Ã10.2Â mm2. Two GAGG block detectors were positioned face to face and set on a flexible arm based detector stand. All 0.5Â mm GAGG pixels in the block detectors were clearly resolved in the 2-dimensional position histogram. The energy resolution was 14.4% FWHM for the Cs-137 gamma ray. The spatial resolution was 0.7Â mm FWHM measured using a 0.25Â mm diameter Na-22 point source. Small animal and plant images were successfully obtained. We conclude that our developed ultrahigh-resolution Si-PM-based dual-head coincidence imaging system is promising for small animal and plant imaging research.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Physics and Astronomy
Instrumentation
Authors
Seiichi Yamamoto, Hiroshi Watabe, Yasukazu Kanai, Katsuhiko Kato, Jun Hatazawa,