October 27, 2020: Dr. Daniel Franklin (Univ. Tech. Sydney, Australia), Nanocomposite and Transparent Ceramic Monolithic Scintillators – a Pathway to Low-Cost PET

One of the main factors in the cost of PET scanners is the scintillator crystals used to detect the 511 keV gamma photons emitted from positron annihilations. Conventional PET systems utilise huge numbers of tiny individual crystals, with complex light-sharing schemes needed to obtain depth of interaction (DOI) information. While monolithic scintillators offer a simpler alternative to discrete crystal PET, large single-crystal scintillators with uniform optical properties are both expensive and difficult to fabricate in non-planar geometries. Two new classes of scintillator materials – nanocomposites and transparent polycrystalline ceramics – can potentially enable fabrication of high quality monolithic scintillator blocks in non-planar geometries, at a substantially lower cost compared to conventional scintillator materials. However, due to their inferior optical properties, a number of performance trade-offs must be considered in the design of position-sensitive detectors based on these materials. In this presentation, I will describe an optimisation method which can be applied to the design of monolithic nanocomposite and transparent ceramic scintillator slabs, and present some initial results for a PET scanner design which exploits these capabilities.

Speaker: Dr. Daniel Franklin, Univ. Tech. Sydney

Time: 15:30, Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Venue: G2-315, 144 Xuan Thuy, Cau Giay, Hanoi