Image Reconstruction Analysis for Positron Emission Tomography With Heterostructured Scintillators

The concept of structure engineering has been proposed for exploring the next generation of radiation detectors with improved performance. A TOF-PET geometry with heterostructured scintillators with a pixel size of 3.0 × 3.1 × 15 mm³ was simulated using Monte Carlo. The heterostructures consisted of alternating layers of BGO as a dense material with high stopping power and plastic (EJ232) as a fast light emitter. The detector time resolution was calculated as a function of the deposited and shared energy in both materials on an event-by-event basis. While sensitivity was reduced to 32% for 100-μm thick plastic layers and 52% for 50 μm, the coincidence time resolution (CTR) distribution improved to 204 ± 49 and 220 ± 41 ps, respectively, compared to 276 ps that we considered for bulk BGO. The complex distribution of timing resolutions was accounted for in the reconstruction. We divided the events into three groups based on their CTR and modeled them with different Gaussian TOF kernels. On an NEMA IQ phantom, the heterostructures had better contrast recovery in early iterations. On the other hand, BGO achieved a better contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) after the 15th iteration due to the higher sensitivity. The developed simulation and reconstruction methods constitute new tools for evaluating different detector designs with complex time responses.