Simulation study of a depth-encoding positron emission tomography detector inserting horizontal-striped glass between crystal layers

This study introduces a depth-encoding positron emission tomography (PET) detector inserting a horizontal-striped glass between the pixilated scintillation crystal layers. This design allows light spreading so that scintillation photons can travel only through the X direction and allows alteration in the light distribution so that it can generate a unique pattern diagram of the two-dimensional (2-D) flood histogram that identifies depth position as well as X - Y position of γ -ray interaction. A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted for the assessment of the depth of interaction (DOI)-PET detector. The traced light distribution for each event was converted into the 2-D flood histogram. Light loss caused by inserting the horizontal-striped glass between the crystal layers was estimated. Applicable weighting factors were examined for each DOI-PET detector. No considerable degradation of light loss was observed. The flood histogram, without overlapping of each crystal position, can be generated for the DOI detector based on each crystal block by inserting the horizontal-striped glass with a thickness of > 1 mm and the modified resistive charge division networks with applicable weighting factors. This study demonstrated that the proposed DOI-PET detector can extract the three-dimensional γ -ray interaction position without considerable performance degradations of the PET detector from the 2-D flood histogram.