In this work, a small animal PET scanner named SIAT aPET was developed using dual-ended readout depth encoding detectors to simultaneously achieve high spatial resolution and high sensitivity. The scanner consists of four detector rings with 12 detector modules per ring; the ring diameter is 111 mm and the axial field of view (FOV) is 105.6 mm. The images are reconstructed using an ordered subset expectation maximization (OSEM) algorithm. The spatial resolution of the scanner was measured by using a 22Na point source at the center axial FOV with different radial offsets. The sensitivity of the scanner was measured at center axis of the scanner with different axial positions. The count rate performance of the system was evaluated by scanning mouse-sized and rat-sized phantoms. An ultra-micro hot-rods phantom and two mice injected with 18F-NaF and 18F-FDG were scanned on the scanner. An average depth of interaction (DOI) resolution of 1.96 mm, energy resolution of 19.1% and timing resolution of 1.20 ns were obtained for the detector. Average spatial resolutions of 0.82 mm and 1.16 mm were obtained up to a distance of 30 mm radially from the center of the FOV when reconstructing a point source in 1% and 10% warm backgrounds, respectively, using OSEM reconstruction with 16 subsets and 10 iterations. Sensitivities of 16.0% and 11.9% were achieved at center of the scanner for energy windows of 250–750 keV and 350–750 keV respectively. Peak noise equivalent count rates (NECRs) of 324 kcps and 144 kcps were obtained at an activity of 26.4 MBq for the mouse-sized and rat-sized phantoms. Rods of 1.0 mm diameter can be visually resolved from the image of the ultra-micro hot-rods phantom. The capability of the scanner was demonstrated by high quality in-vivo mouse images.
Four high resolution depth encoding small animal PET detectors were developed using dual-ended readout of pixelated scintillator arrays with SiPMs. The performance results show that those detectors can be used to build a small animal PET scanner to simultaneously achieve uniform high spatial resolution and high sensitivity.
Entangling independent photons is not only of fundamental interest but also of crucial importance for quantum information science. Two-photon interference is a major method to entangle independent identical photons. If two photons are color-different, perfect two-photon coalescence cannot happen anymore, which makes the entangling of color-different photons difficult to realize. In this letter by exploring and developing time-resolved measurement and active feed-forward, we have entangled two independent photons of different colors for the first time. We find that entanglement with a varying form can be identified for different two-photon temporal modes through time-resolved measurement. By using active feed-forward we are able to convert the varying entanglement into uniform. Adopting these measures, we have successfully entangled two photons with a frequency separation of 16 times larger than their linewidths. In addition to its fundamental interest, our work also provides an approach to solve the frequency mismatch problem for future quantum networks. Entangling independent photons through two-photon interference [1,2] is ubiquitous in photonic quantum information experiments [3][4][5]. When two identical photons are superimposed on a beam-splitter, the probabilities of both photons are transmitted or both are reflected interfere with each other and result in two-photon coalescence. Such a two-photon interference effect has been first observed by Hong, Ou and Mandel [6]. From a more fundamental point of view, this interference is due to the bosonic nature of photons [7]. Two identical photons have a symmetric wave function, thus their spacial wave function has to be symmetric, which leads to photon coalescence after passing through a beam-splitter. Therefore, only an anti-symmetric two-photon state will lead to a coincidence between different output ports of a beamsplitter, which constitutes the physical basis of measuring Bell states and entangling independent photons. What if the input photons are color-different, can we still make Bell-state measurement and entangle independent photons as usual, for instance in the degrees of polarization, time-bin and momentum?Entangling color-different photons also has strong practical applications. In quantum networking [8], photons from separate quantum systems are often different in color due to various reasons. For instance, in the condensed matter systems such as quantum dots, nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers, photons from two separate emitters are usually different in frequency due to their different local environments [9,10]. For all quantum systems, when they are moving with a high-speed (e.g. in a satellite or an airplane), the Doppler effect will give rise to significant frequency shifts for the emitting photons. Besides, the strong interest in hybrid quantum networking by combining the advantages of each physical system also necessitates the entangling operation between color-different photons. Preliminary studies have been carried out on the quantum beat of two ...
PET scanners using SiPMs as photodetectors could have tens of thousands of SiPMs. To simplify the readout electronics, analog signal multiplexing readouts are always preferred to be used as early as possible. In this paper, two simple analog signal multiplexing readouts, a capacitive charge-division readout, and a resistive charge-division readout were evaluated and compared using dual-ended readout detectors based on 10 × 10 arrays of SensL MicroFJ-30035 SiPMs coupled to both ends of a 20 × 20 LYSO array with a pitch size of 1.5 mm and a length of 20 mm. The performance of the detectors were evaluated at different bias voltages (from 27.0 V to 30.5 V with an interval of 0.5 V) and a temperature of 22.8 °C. The flood histograms show that all the crystals in the LYSO array were clearly identified, whilst better flood histogram was obtained using the resistive charge-division readout. At a bias voltage of 29.5V, the flood histogram quality, energy resolution, DOI resolution, and timing resolution of the detector obtained using the capacitive charge-division readout were 3.28 ± 0.85, 18.9% ± 6.2%, 1.93 ± 0.20 mm, 1.25 ± 0.11 ns respectively, and those obtained using the resistive charge-division readout were 3.57 ± 0.81, 16.9% ± 6.5%, 1.96 ± 0.23 mm and 1.23 ± 0.07 ns, respectively. Overall, the detector with the resistive charge-division readout provided better performance.
In this work, a GPU-accelerated fully 3D ordered-subset expectation maximization (OSEM) image reconstruction with point spread function (PSF) modeling was developed for a small animal PET scanner with a long axial field of view (FOV). Dual-ended readout detectors that provided high depth of interaction (DOI) resolution were used for the small animal PET scanner to simultaneously achieve uniform high spatial resolution and high sensitivity. First, we developed a novel sinogram generation method, in which the dimension of the sinogram was determined first and then an event was assigned to a few neighboring sinogram elements by using weights that are inversely proportional to the distance from the measured line of response (LOR) to the LOR of the sinogram elements. System geometric symmetry, precomputation of LOR-driven ray-tracing and texture memory were applied to accelerate the GPU-based reconstruction. We developed a spatially variant PSF model where the PSF parameters were obtained by using point source images measured at 18 positions in the FOV and a spatial invariant PSF model where the PSF parameters were obtained by using only one image measured at the center FOV. The performance of the image reconstruction method was evaluated by using simulated phantom data as well as phantom and in-vivo mouse data acquired on the scanner. The results showed that the proposed reconstruction method provided better spatial resolution, a higher contrast recovery coefficient and lower noise than the OSEM reconstruction and was more than 1000 times faster than the CPU-based reconstruction. The spatially variant PSF model did not result in any spatial resolution improvement compared to the spatial invariant PSF model, and thus, the latter that is much easier to implement in image reconstruction and can be used in a small animal PET scanner using detectors with very high DOI resolution. A whole body 18F-FDG mouse image with high resolution and a high contrast to noise ratio was obtained by using the proposed reconstruction method.
particles directly determines the performance of time resolution, response rate, and counting ability of radiation detectors. For example, dynamic high speed X-ray imaging requires frame rates of 2 ns (GHz) and thus the scintillator with sub-nanosecond response is in urgent demand. [3] Sub-nanosecond scintillator is also highly needed in PET detector module to increase the accidental coincidence rate, without image reconstruction to approaching the recognized goals of 10 ps time resolution. [2,7,8] Some nuclear physics experiments with very high count rates required sub-nanosecond scintillation to avoid signal piling up. [9] BaF 2 , CsCl, and ZnO:Ga scintillators have demonstrated sub-nanosecond response speed, with the short lifetime as 0.8, 0.9, and 0.7 ns, respectively. [10,11] However, BaF 2 and CsCl suffered from longstanding weakness of extra-low light yield (<1500 photons MeV −1 ) due to the inefficient core-valence transitions and also an undesirable slow lifetime component (few microseconds). [10] Besides the low light yield, ZnO: Ga scintillator was also limited by the manufacturing difficulty in bulk crystal and high production cost. [11,12] Therefore, new sub-nanosecond scintillator materials with considerable light yield urgently need to be explored. Perovskite materials have emerged as a new family of radiation scintillators with tunable wavelength andPerovskite materials have demonstrated great potential for ultrafast scintillators with high light yield. However, the decay time of perovskite still cannot be further minimized into sub-nanosecond region, while sub-nanosecond scintillators are highly demanded in various radiation detection, including high speed X-ray imaging, time-of-flight based tomography or particle discrimination, and timing resolution measurement in synchrotron radiation facilities, etc. Here, a rational design strategy is showed to shorten the scintillation decay time, by maximizing the dielectric difference between organic amines and Pb-Br octahedral emitters in 2D organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites (OIHP). Benzimidazole (BM) with low dielectric constant inserted between [PbBr 6 ] 2− layers, resulting in a surprisingly large exciton binding energy (360.3 ± 4.8 meV) of 2D OIHP BM 2 PbBr 4 . The emitting decay time is shortened as 0.97 ns, which is smallest among all the perovskite materials. Moreover, the light yield is 3190 photons MeV −1 , which is greatly higher than conventional ultrafast scintillator BaF 2 (1500 photons MeV −1 ). The rare combination of ultrafast decay time and considerable light yield renders BM 2 PbBr 4 excellent performance in γ-ray, neutron, α-particle detection, and the best theoretical coincidence time resolution of 65.1 ps, which is only half of the reference sample LYSO (141.3 ps).
A depth encoding PET detector module using semi-monolithic scintillation crystal single-ended readout by a SiPM array was built and its performance was measured. The semi-monolithic scintillator detector consists of 11 polished LYSO slices measuring 1 × 11.6 × 10 mm. The slices are glued together with enhanced specular reflector (ESR) in between and outside of the slices. The bottom surface of the slices is coupled to a 4 × 4 SiPM array with a 1 mm light guide and silicon grease between them. No reflector is used on the top surface and two sides of the slices to reduce the scintillation photon reflection. The signals of the 4 × 4 SiPM array are grouped along rows and columns separately into eight signals. Four SiPM column signals are used to identify the slices according to the center of the gravity of the scintillation photon distribution in the pixelated direction. Four SiPM row signals are used to estimate the y (monolithic direction) and z (depth of interaction) positions according to the center of the gravity and the width of the scintillation photon distribution in the monolithic direction, respectively. The detector was measured with 1 mm sampling interval in both the y and z directions with electronic collimation by using a 0.25 mm diameter Na point source and a 1 × 1 × 20 mm LYSO crystal detector. An average slice based energy resolution of 14.9% was obtained. All slices of 1 mm thick were clearly resolved and a detector with even thinner slices could be used. The y positions calculated with the center of gravity method are different for interactions happening at the same y, but different z positions due to depth dependent edge effects. The least-square minimization and the maximum likelihood positioning algorithms were developed and both methods improved the spatial resolution at the edges of the detector as compared with the center of gravity method. A mean absolute error (MAE) which is defined as the probability-weighted mean of the absolute value of the positioning error is used to evaluate the spatial resolution. An average MAE spatial resolution of ~1.15 mm was obtained in both y and z directions without rejection of the multiple scattering events. The average MAE spatial resolution was ~0.7 mm in both y and z directions after the multiple scattering events were rejected. The timing resolution of the detector is 575 ps. In the next step, long rectangle detector will be built to reduce edge effects and improve the spatial resolution of the semi-monolithic detector. Thick detector up to 20 mm will be explored and the positioning algorithms will be further optimized.
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