Performance Evaluation of jPET-RD Detector Composed of 32 × 32 × 4 LYSO Crystal Array.

jPET-RD (for Rodents with depth of interaction (DOI) detectors) is the small animal PET scanner which is under development at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan. High sensitivity is expected without degradation of the spatial resolution by the use of four-layer DOI detectors in the scanner. The detector consists of four-layers of scintillation crystal array optically coupled to a position sensitive photo-detector and scintillation light controlled by a proper reflector arrangement in the crystal array provides information for the crystal of detection. A basic study such as the validation of the four-layer DOI encoding method and detector parameter optimization has been carried out with a subset of the crystal arrays; a 10 × 10 × 4 array of Lu2(1−x)Y2xSiO5 (LYSO, x=0.02). We determined detector parameters through the basic study and will compose the full-size detector with a 32 × 32 × 4 LYSO crystal array. In this paper, we introduce the jPET-RD system, detector design and its performance. The subset of crystal array in optimal design showed enough crystal identification performance and 12-17% energy resolutions for all layer crystals. The results confirm the expectation of the same level performance on the full-size detector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]