Novel scintillating material 2-(4-styrylphenyl)benzoxazole for the fully digital and MRI compatible J-PET tomograph based on plastic scintillators

Wieczorek, A.; Dulski, K.; Niedźwiecki, Szymon; Alfs, D.; Białas, P.; Curceanu, C.; Czerwiński, E.; Danel, A.; Gajos, A.; Głowacz, B.; Gorgol, M.; Hiesmayr, Beatrix C.; Jasińska, B.; Kacprzak, K.; Kamińska, D.; Kapłon, Ł.; Kochanowski, Andrzej; Korcyl, G.; Kozik, T.; Krzemień, W.; Kubicz, E.; Kucharek, Mateusz; Mohammed, M.; Pawlik-Niedźwiecka, M.; Pałka, M.; Raczyński, L.; Rudy, Z.; Rundel, O.; Sharma, N.G.; Silarski, M.; Uchacz, Tomasz; Wiślicki, W.; Zgardzińska, B.; Zieliński, Marcin; Moskal, P.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0186728

Cited by 21 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…With plastics strips, the number of electronics channels may be reduced significanty also for the total body PET, because of more than order of magnitude lower light attenuation of plastics compared to crystals [73], and hence application of long strips. In principle, a total body PET may be constructed from two 100-cm-long cylinders or even single 200-cm-long strips since the plastic scintillators' attenuation length may be as long as 400 cm.…”

Section: Plastic Scintillatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

State of the art in total body PET

2020

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The idea of a very sensitive positron emission tomography (PET) system covering a large portion of the body of a patient already dates back to the early 1990s. In the period 2000-2010, only some prototypes with long axial field of view (FOV) have been built, which never resulted in systems used for clinical research. One of the reasons was the limitations in the available detector technology, which did not yet have sufficient energy resolution, timing resolution or countrate capabilities for fully exploiting the benefits of a long axial FOV design. PET was also not yet as widespread as it is today: the growth in oncology, which has become the major application of PET, appeared only after the introduction of PET-CT (early 2000). The detector technology used in most clinical PET systems today has a combination of good energy and timing resolution with higher countrate capabilities and has now been used since more than a decade to build time-of-flight (TOF) PET systems with fully 3D acquisitions. Based on this technology, one can construct total body PET systems and the remaining challenges (data handling, fast image reconstruction, detector cooling) are mostly related to engineering. The direct benefits of long axial FOV systems are mostly related to the higher sensitivity. For single organ imaging, the gain is close to the point source sensitivity which increases linearly with the axial length until it is limited by solid angle and attenuation of the body. The gains for single organ (compared to a fully 3D PET 20-cm axial FOV) are limited to a factor 3-4. But for long objects (like body scans), it increases quadratically with scanner length and factors of 10-40× higher sensitivity are predicted for the long axial FOV scanner. This application of PET has seen a major increase (mostly in oncology) during the last 2 decades and is now the main type of study in a PET centre. As the technology is available and the full body concept also seems to match with existing applications, the old concept of a total body PET scanner is seeing a clear revival. Several research groups are working on this concept and after showing the potential via extensive simulations; construction of these systems has started about 2 years ago. In the first phase, two PET systems with long axial FOV suitable for large animal imaging were constructed to explore the potential in more experimental settings. Recently, the first completed total body PET systems for human use, a 70-cm-long system, called PennPET Explorer, and a 2-m-long system, called uExplorer, have become reality and first clinical studies have been shown. These results illustrate the large potential of this concept with regard to low-dose imaging, faster scanning, whole-body dynamic imaging and follow-up of tracers over longer periods. This large range of possible technical improvements seems

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Section: Plastic Scintillatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

State of the art in total body PET

2020

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“…The position of interaction along the plastic strip is calculated based on the time difference of light signals arriving at both photomultipliers. Signals from the plastic scintillators are very fast (rise time ≈ 0.5 ns, fall time ≈ 1.8 ns) 6 and are prone to much lower pileups with respect to crystal based detectors with order of magnitude larger fall times 43 . Therefore, to avoid the dead time due to the direct charge measurement, only timing of signals is used.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, it reduces the readout cost by using only time to digital converter (TDC) combining both timing and energy information. Application of TOT method for the energy loss determination may be of particular advantage in the newly developed J-PET positron emission tomograph 3,4 which is based on plastic scintillators characterized by fast light signals with rise and decay times of the order of ≈ 1 ns 5,6 and thus being about two orders of magnitude shorter than signals from crystals used in the current PET devices [7][8][9] . Therefore, application of the TOT method in case of the J-PET tomograph build from plastic scintillators will enable fast signal processing reducing significantly signal acquisition dead time with respect to the crystal based tomographs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating relationship between the Time Over Threshold and energy loss by photons in plastic scintillators used in the J-PET scanner

Sharma¹,

Chhokar²,

Curceanu³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Time-Over-Threshold (TOT) technique is being used widely due to its implications in developing the multi-channel readouts mainly when fast signal processing is required. Using TOT technique as a measure of energy loss instead of charge integration methods significantly reduces the signals readout cost by combining the time and energy information. Therefore, this approach can potentially be used in J-PET tomograph which is build from plastic scintillators characterized by fast light signals. The drawback in adopting this technique is lying in the non-linear correlation between input energy loss and TOT of the signal. The main motivation behind this work is to develop the relationship between TOT and energy loss and validate it with the J-PET tomograph. Methods:The experiment was performed using the 22 Na beta emitter source placed in the center of the J-PET tomograph. One can obtain primary photons of two different energies: 511 keV photon from the annihilation of positron (direct annihilation or through the formation of para-Positronim atom or pick-off process of ortho-Positronium atoms), and 1275 keV prompt photon. This allows to study the correlation between TOT values and energy loss for energy range up to 1000 keV. As the photon interacts dominantly via Compton scattering inside the plastic scintillator, there is no direct information of primary photon's energy. However, using the J-PET geometry one can measure the scattering angle of the interacting photon. Since, 22 Na source emits photons of two different energies, it is required to know unambiguously the energy of incident photons and its corresponding scattering angle for the estimation of energy deposition. In this work, dedicated algorithms were developed to tag the photons of different energies and studying their scattering angles to calculate the energy deposition by the interacting photons.Results: A new method was elaborated to measure the energy loss by interacting photons with plastic scintillators used in J-PET tomograph. It is found that relationship between the energy loss and Time Over Threshold is non-linear and can be described by function TOT = A0 + A1 * ln(E dep + A2) + A3 * (ln(E dep + A2)) 2 .Conclusions: A relationship between Time Over Threshold and energy loss by interacting photons inside the plastic scintillators used in J-PET scanner is established for a energy deposited range 100-1000 keV.

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“…J-PET exploits time information instead of energy to determine place of annihilation. Scintillating signals from plastics are very fast (typically, 0.5 ns rise time and 1.8 ns decay time [20]- [22]). Such fast signals allow for superior time resolution and decrease pile-ups with respect to crystals detectors as e.g.…”

Section: General Concept Of the J-pet Scannermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The reference detector was a narrow and elongated (5 × 5 × 19 mm 3 ) BC-420 scintillator optically coupled with an additional photomultiplier. The geometry of the reference scintillator forced the self-collimation of photons from the 22 Na source, preferring photons moving close to the longitudinal axis of the scintillator to reach the reference photomultiplier. The system used for mutual synchronization of detection modules is schematically presented in the left part of Fig.…”

Section: Synchronization Of the J-pet Prototypementioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronisation and calibration of the 24-modules J-PET prototype with 300~mm axial field of view

Moskal,

Bednarski,

Niedzwiecki

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Research conducted in the framework of the J-PET project aims to develop a cost-effective total-body positron emission tomography scanner. As a first step on the way to construct a full-scale J-PET tomograph from long strips of plastic scintillators, a 24-strip prototype was built and tested. The prototype consists of detection modules arranged axially forming a cylindrical diagnostic chamber with the inner diameter of 360 mm and the axial field-of-view of 300 mm. Promising perspectives for a low-cost construction of a total-body PET scanner are opened due to an axial arrangement of strips of plastic scintillators, wchich have a small light attenuation, superior timing properties, and the possibility of cost-effective increase of the axial field-of-view. The presented prototype comprises dedicated solely digital front-end electronic circuits and a triggerless data acquisition system which required development of new calibration methods including time, thresholds and gain synchronization. The system and elaborated calibration methods including first results of the 24-module J-PET prototype are presented and discussed. The achieved coincidence resolving time equals to CRT = 490 ± 9 ps. This value can be translated to the position reconstruction accuracy σ (∆l) = 18 mm which is fairly position-independent.

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Novel scintillating material 2-(4-styrylphenyl)benzoxazole for the fully digital and MRI compatible J-PET tomograph based on plastic scintillators

Cited by 21 publications

References 31 publications

State of the art in total body PET

State of the art in total body PET

Estimating relationship between the Time Over Threshold and energy loss by photons in plastic scintillators used in the J-PET scanner

Synchronisation and calibration of the 24-modules J-PET prototype with 300~mm axial field of view

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