Feasibility study of multiplexing analog signals from SiPMs for a single layer monolithic PET detector design

Abstract

Semi monolithic detector designs with a series of stacked thin monolithic scintillator plates and side readout are an attractive approach for potentially achieving very high performance in a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner. In this work, a simulation study of a single layer monolithic detector module was performed with side read out of scintillation light using GATEv8.2. In this design, a single layer LSO crystal was used with dimensions 40 mm*40 mm*40 mm, with 0.60 mm thickness of the ESR (enhanced specular reflector) films covering the crystal's top and bottom surfaces. The photons generated in the scintillation process induced by the gamma ray hitting the crystal were detected by four 1*8 SiPM (silicon photomultiplier) arrays placed along the four sides of the crystal. The scintillation light distribution detected by all of the 32 SiPMs surrounding the crystal layer was then used to extract the gamma-crystal interaction location based on machine learning analysis. In this work, the spatial resolution of the detector module was explored when analog signals from each of the 32 SiPMs were summed to 28, 24, 20, 16, 12, 8, and 4 total outputs. This study showed that good spatial resolution can be achieved even when the number of read out channels is decreased by multiplexing, which can reduce the overall detector manufacturing cost.