New developments in detectors for in-beam PET

State-of-the-art technology has outperformed the efficiency of the positron emission tomograph installed at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung for monitoring, in-beam, ion radiation therapy. In addition, the special requirements of in-beam PET have been better understood. We explain these special requisites and present dedicated in-beam PET readout solutions, either tested in-beam or under development. Experimental results obtained with two multi-pixel, gamma-ray detectors consisting of lutetium oxyorthosilicate (LSO) coupled to avalanche photodiode arrays (APDA) show that this detector provides a good solution for improved, next-generation in-beam PET scanners.
Nevertheless, we extrapolate recent detector and scintillator developments, enabling sub-nanosecond coincidence time resolution (T), onto a possile in-beam time-of-flight (TOF) PET scanner. We show that T < 200 ps full-width-at-half-maximum allows:
(1) images to be shown to the radiooncologist in real-time,
(2) artifact-free images to be obtained from dual-head tomographs,
(3) an absolute quantification of image intensity and
(4) to obtain optimum PET images corrected from biological washout mechanisms.