Recent advances and future perspectives of position sensitive PMT

In recent years there has been a growing interest in developing compact gamma cameras to improve gamma ray imaging for application in nuclear medicine as well as in astrophysics, radiation physics and high energy physics. The gamma cameras based on position sensitive photomultipliers could be the best chance to obtain a realistic and low cost compact gamma camera. Since 1985 the development of position sensitive photo multiplier tubes (PSPMT) has shown the highest rate in technological advancement achieving very compact size (25 x 25 x 20 mm(3)) by a novel charge multiplication system. The PSPMT shows the same advantages of a standard gamma camera with the additional possibility to utilize scintillation arrays with pixel dimension less than 1 mm, thus achieving sub-millimeter spatial resolution values. The last technological advance is a PSPMT with Flat Panel structure, named H8500. Its dimension is 50 x 50 mm(2) with a narrow peripheral dead zone to place closely different modules achieving large detection areas. In this paper the technological development of different PSPMT generations is reviewed and some measurements of the first Flat Panel PMT prototype are presented and compared with ones from previous generation. Flat Panel PMT could be the best trade-off between compactness, large detection areas, effective area (packing density) and imaging performance. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.