A practical method for depth of interaction determination in monolithic scintillator PET detectors

Several new methods for determining the depth of interaction (DOI) of annihilation photons in monolithic scintillator detectors with single-sided, multi-pixel readout are investigated. The aim is to develop a DOI decoding method that allows for practical implementation in a positron emission tomography system. Specifically, calibration data, obtained with perpendicularly incident gamma photons only, are being used. Furthermore, neither detector modifications nor a priori knowledge of the light transport and/or signal variances is required. For this purpose, a clustering approach is utilized in combination with different parameters correlated with the DOI, such as the degree of similarity to a set of reference light distributions, the measured intensity on the sensor pixel(s) closest to the interaction position and the peak intensity of the measured light distribution. The proposed methods were tested experimentally on a detector comprised of a 20 mm x 20 mm x 12 mm polished LYSO: Ce crystal coupled to a 4 x 4 multi-anode photomultiplier. The method based on the linearly interpolated measured intensities on the sensor pixels closest to the estimated (x, y)-coordinate outperformed the other methods, yielding DOI resolutions between similar to 1 and similar to 4.5 mm FWHM depending on the DOI, the (x, y) resolution and the amount of reference data used.