Energy discrimination for positron emission tomography using the time information of the first detected photons

The advantages of Time-of-Flight positron emission tomography (TOF-PET) have pushed the development of detectors with better time resolution. In particular, Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM) have evolved tremendously in the past decade and arrays with a fully digital readout are the next logical step (dSiPM). New multi-timestamp methods use the precise time information of multiple photons to estimate the time of a PET event with greater accuracy, resulting in excellent time resolution.

We propose a method which uses the same timestamps as the time estimator to perform energy discrimination, thus using data obtained within 5 ns of the beginning of the event. Having collected all the necessary information, the dSiPM could then be disabled for the remaining scintillation while dedicated electronics process the collected data. This would reduce afterpulsing as the SPAD would be turned off for several hundred nanoseconds, emptying the majority of traps.

The proposed method uses a strategy based on subtraction and minimal electronics to reject energy below a selected threshold. This method achieves an error rate of less than 3% for photopeak discrimination (threshold at 400 keV) for dark count rates up to 100 cps/μm², time-to-digital converter resolution up to 50 ps and a photon detection efficiency ranging from 10 to 70%.