ABSTRACT

Positron emission tomography (PET) generates functional information related to biological activities within living subjects. This chapter helps the readers with some of the advances in PET detector design and instrumentation for high resolution molecular imaging applications. It reviews the PET detector physics and the necessity of resolving Depth Of Interaction (DOI) within detectors for high resolution applications. PET is a nuclear imaging technique that is based on the imaging of positron annihilation events inside a patient's body. Compared to conventional PET, time-of-flight-PET benefits from various advantages including reduced dose to arrive at a certain image quality, and improved contrast and spatial resolution for a given radioactive dose or imaging time. DOI detectors are one of the mainstream research and development topics in PET detectors because of their essential importance in the development of high resolution PET systems. Scintillators used in PET are usually crystals because of their superior optical properties compared to noncrystalline scintillators such as ceramics.