Performance characterization of compressed sensing positron emission tomography detectors and data acquisition system

In the field of information theory, compressed sensing (CS) had been developed to recover signals at a lower sampling rate than suggested by the Nyquist-Shannon theorem, provided the signals have a sparse representation with respect to some base. CS has recently emerged as a method to multiplex PET detector readouts thanks to the sparse nature of 511 keV photon interactions in a typical PET study. We have shown in our previous numerical studies that, at the same multiplexing ratio, CS achieves higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) compared to Anger and cross-strip multiplexing. In addition, unlike Anger logic, multiplexing by CS preserves the capability to resolve multi-hit events, in which multiple pixels are triggered within the resolving time of the detector. In this work, we characterized the time, energy and intrinsic spatial resolution of two CS detectors and a data acquisition system we have developed for a PET insert system for simultaneous PET/MRI. The CS detector comprises a 2 x 4 mosaic of 4 x 4 arrays of 3.2 x 3.2 x 20 mm(3) lutetium-yttrium orthosilicate crystals coupled one-to-one to eight 4 x 4 silicon photomultiplier arrays. The total number of 128 pixels is multiplexed down to 16 readout channels by CS. The energy, coincidence time and intrinsic spatial resolution achieved by two CS detectors were 15.4±0.1% FWHM at 511 keV, 4.5 ns FWHM and 2.3 mm FWHM, respectively. A series of experiments were conducted to measure the sources of time jitter that limit the time resolution of the current system, which provides guidance for potential system design improvements. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of compressed sensing as a promising multiplexing method for PET detectors.