Digital Signal Processing Techniques to Improve Time Resolution in Positron Emission Tomography

摘要

Coincidence time resolution is one of the most important issues in PET detectors. Improving this resolution is required to increase the noise equivalent count rate (NECR) that reduces the noise in the reconstructed images. The aim of this work is to evaluate the behavior and time resolution of different proposed time pick-off algorithms in order to select the best configuration for our PET system. The experimental setup used for this research is composed by two monolithic LSO crystals${+}$ PSPMT detectors and an FPGA based PET data acquisition system (DAQ). The acquired signals are sampled using a 12-bit 70 MHz analog to digital converter (ADC) per channel. The setup has no centralized electronics for trigger and event time extraction. Consequently, events for each detector head are processed independently and all the signals are acquired in the same way.