Silicon Photomultipliers and their use in a combined PET/MR System

by Florian Schneider (E18)

Thursday 21 Oct 2010, 09:15 → 11:00 Europe/Berlin

Seminar Room 3268 (TUM - Garching - Physik Department E18)

The development of a combined PET/MRI scanner with simultaneous image aquisition of both systems demands new PET detector types and scanner designs. In the first stage, a high resolution PET scanner prototype for feasibility and performance studies has been set up, based on MPPCs/SiPMs (Multi Pixel Photon Counters/Silicon Photomultipliers). SiPMs are known to work in high magnetic fields at least up to 7 T, which makes them a suitable choice for a combined PET/MRI. As scintillator material, LYSO (Lutetium-Yttrium-Oxyorthosilicate) has been chosen. The analog data of each SiPM is digitized by sampling analog to digital converters (SADCs) and processed within field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to extract amplitudes and timestamps. The data is transmitted via USB to a standard PC running Linux, where further processing and the image reconstruction are done.