Prism-PET: A TOF-DOI-Compton PET detector technology for total-body PET imaging

Abstract The relatively small axial field-of-view (FOV) in almost all PET scanners has severely limited their sensitivity and resulted in significant tradeoffs between image signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), acquisition time, and delivered dose. The solution is to improve geometric coverage using large axial FOV for total-body imaging which has the potential to improve sensitivity by about 40 times compared to existing commercial whole-body PET scanners. The construction of the world's first total-body PET/CT scan-ner, called EXPLORER, with 194-cm axial FOV has recently been completed. However, it has a poor time-of-flight (TOF) resolution of 430 ps, compared to the state-of-the-art whole-body PET scanner with 200 ps timing resolution (Siemens Biograph Vision). In addition, axial detector penetration of obliquely incident gamma photons detected within this wide acceptance angle will introduce significant depth-of-interaction (DOI) parallax error, leading to degraded spatial resolution. These two major defi-ciencies of the EXPLORER scanner offset its effective sensitivity gain, specially for imaging single organs such as the human brain when compared to the Biograph Vision PET scanner. For this research, we propose to build cost-effective block detectors with combined highest spatial resolution (2 mm), highest TOF resolution (