{"title":"Emphasizing Cherenkov Photons From Bismuth Germanate by Single Photon Response Deconvolution","authors":"Ryosuke Ota;Kibo Ote","doi":"10.1109/TRPMS.2024.3403959","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Bismuth germanate (BGO) has been receiving attention again because it is a potential scintillator for future time-of-flight positron emission tomography. Owing to its optical properties, BGO emits a relatively large number of Cherenkov photons after 511-keV gamma-ray interactions, which can enable good coincidence time resolution (CTR). Nonetheless, optimally exploiting the Cherenkov emissions can be confounded by scintillation emissions. Thus, we propose a method efficiently emphasizing Cherenkov photon from a detector waveform by deconvolving a single photon response of photodetector. As a proof-of-concept, we perform the deconvolution, and a probability density function (PDF) of BGO was obtained, which is compared to a conventional time correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) method. Furthermore, we investigate if the proposed deconvolution can emphasize a faint Cherenkov signal. Consequently, the PDF obtained by the proposed deconvolution shows a good agreement with that obtained using a conventional TCSPC methods. A CTR obtained using the proposed deconvolution is improved by 12% and 43% in full width at half maximum compared to a voltage-based leading edge discriminator for with and without high-frequency readout electronics, respectively. Thus, the proposed deconvolution method can efficiently emphasize Cherenkov photon by lowering the threshold level and improve the timing performance of BGO-based detectors.","PeriodicalId":46807,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10537043/","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"RADIOLOGY, NUCLEAR MEDICINE & MEDICAL IMAGING","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Bismuth germanate (BGO) has been receiving attention again because it is a potential scintillator for future time-of-flight positron emission tomography. Owing to its optical properties, BGO emits a relatively large number of Cherenkov photons after 511-keV gamma-ray interactions, which can enable good coincidence time resolution (CTR). Nonetheless, optimally exploiting the Cherenkov emissions can be confounded by scintillation emissions. Thus, we propose a method efficiently emphasizing Cherenkov photon from a detector waveform by deconvolving a single photon response of photodetector. As a proof-of-concept, we perform the deconvolution, and a probability density function (PDF) of BGO was obtained, which is compared to a conventional time correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) method. Furthermore, we investigate if the proposed deconvolution can emphasize a faint Cherenkov signal. Consequently, the PDF obtained by the proposed deconvolution shows a good agreement with that obtained using a conventional TCSPC methods. A CTR obtained using the proposed deconvolution is improved by 12% and 43% in full width at half maximum compared to a voltage-based leading edge discriminator for with and without high-frequency readout electronics, respectively. Thus, the proposed deconvolution method can efficiently emphasize Cherenkov photon by lowering the threshold level and improve the timing performance of BGO-based detectors.