A novel front-end chip for a human PET scanner based on monolithic detector blocks

Abstract

We are developing a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner based on avalanche photodiodes (APD), monolithic LYSO:Ce scintillator crystals and a dedicated readout chip. All these components allow operation inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner with the aim of building a PET/MRI hybrid imaging system for clinical human brain studies. Previous work verified the functional performance of our first chip (VATA240) based on a leading edge comparator and the principle of operation of our radiation sensors, which are capable of providing reconstructed images of positron point sources with spatial resolutions of 2.1 mm FWHM. The new VATA241 chip presented in this work has been designed with the aim of reducing the coincidence window of our final PET scanner by implementing an on-chip constant fraction discriminator (CFD), as well as providing a better robustness for its implementation in the full-scale PET scanner. Results from the characterization of the VATA241 chip are presented, together with the first results on coincidence performance, validating the new design for our application. © 2011 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA.