Positron Emission Tomography (PET) for small animal studies requires high-resolution gamma cameras with high sensitivity. Traditionally, inorganic scintillators are used and, in recent times, coupled to position sensitive PMTS to achieve a higher resolution. Such PSPMTs are costly, operated at high voltage and have a relatively low packing fraction. However, their advantage, compared to current solid state photodetectors, is their high signal-to-noise ratio. The Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) is a silicon diode detector that shows great promise as a photodetector for scintillators and hence application in nuclear medicine imaging applications. The microcell MRS (Metal-Resistor-Semiconductor) structure of the SiPM leads to a self-quenching, Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode (GAPD), that produces a large gain (5 x 105) at low bias voltage (50 V) and proportional output for moderate photon flux. Such a compact silicon detector, with a performance similar to a PMT, is obviously well disposed to being developed into a close-packed array in order to have a position-sensitive detection surface. We propose a miniature, high-resolution camera for a small-animal PET imaging system that is based on such an array of SiPM. The design is based upon the classic Anger camera principle; each detector module consists of a continuous slab of scintillator, viewed by a matrix of SiPM. A detector head of 4 x 4 cm(2) in area is proposed, constructed from three such modules of the continuous camera described above. The stacked layers would give the system intrinsic depth of interaction (DOI) information. A summary of measured SiPM performance and results of a simulation of the proposed camera, using the Monte Carlo package GEANT4, are presented. It is shown that using three layers of 5 mm thick LSO, gives an efficiency of 68% with maximum count rates in the front layers. Intrinsic spatial resolution of < 0.4mm FWHM was found although this is degraded at the edges. Although the inclusion of DOI information increases the overall spatial resolution, the parallax error was still found to be the limiting factor in a small animal system. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
