An Inexpensive Polyvinyltoulene Barrel PET Scanner Design

We present a novel barrel positron-emission tomography (PET) scanner design that provides an inexpensive alternative to current clinical scanners without compromising resolution or sensitivity, using extruded polyvinyltoluene scintillators. While lower efficiency, these scintillators provide a sufficiently fast time resolution at much lower cost, allowing quick exploratory scans for tumor metastases and pathogenic substance identification. The complete detector is comprised of a 24-array barrel, each array 3x4 units of 4 scintillators 1m long wrapped in reflective film and coupled on either end to silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). Preliminary Monte Carlo simulation via the Geant4 toolkit predicts that this scanner attains an energy resolution of about 16.1 to a central point source, and via our k-nearest neighbor algorithm, a depth of interaction resolution of about 15.5mm full-width-half-maximum (FWHM). Assuming a SiPM time resolution of 100ps, a coincidence time resolution of about 270ps FWHM is attained. In our talk we present more details of the design and performance of this PET scanner.