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Llosa, G., Barrio, J., Lacasta, C., Bisogni, M. G., Del Guerra, A., Marcatili, S., et al. (2010). Characterization of a PET detector head based on continuous LYSO crystals and monolithic, 64-pixel silicon photomultiplier matrices. Phys. Med. Biol., 55(23), 7299–7315.
Abstract: The characterization of a PET detector head based on continuous LYSO crystals and silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) arrays as photodetectors has been carried out for its use in the development of a small animal PET prototype. The detector heads are composed of a continuous crystal and a SiPM matrix with 64 pixels in a common substrate, fabricated specifically for this project. Three crystals of 12 mm x 12 mm x 5 mm size with different types of painting have been tested: white, black and black on the sides but white on the back of the crystal. The best energy resolution, obtained with the white crystal, is 16% FWHM. The detector response is linear up to 1275 keV. Tests with different position determination algorithms have been carried out with the three crystals. The spatial resolution obtained with the center of gravity algorithm is around 0.9 mm FWHM for the three crystals. As expected, the use of this algorithm results in the displacement of the reconstructed position toward the center of the crystal, more pronounced in the case of the white crystal. A maximum likelihood algorithm has been tested that can reconstruct correctly the interaction position of the photons also in the case of the white crystal.
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Oliver, J. F., & Rafecas, M. (2010). Improving the singles rate method for modeling accidental coincidences in high-resolution PET. Phys. Med. Biol., 55(22), 6951–6971.
Abstract: Random coincidences ('randoms') are one of the main sources of image degradation in PET imaging. In order to correct for this effect, an accurate method to estimate the contribution of random events is necessary. This aspect becomes especially relevant for high-resolution PET scanners where the highest image quality is sought and accurate quantitative analysis is undertaken. One common approach to estimate randoms is the so-called singles rate method (SR) widely used because of its good statistical properties. SR is based on the measurement of the singles rate in each detector element. However, recent studies suggest that SR systematically overestimates the correct random rate. This overestimation can be particularly marked for low energy thresholds, below 250 keV used in some applications and could entail a significant image degradation. In this work, we investigate the performance of SR as a function of the activity, geometry of the source and energy acceptance window used. We also investigate the performance of an alternative method, which we call 'singles trues' (ST) that improves SR by properly modeling the presence of true coincidences in the sample. Nevertheless, in any real data acquisition the knowledge of which singles are members of a true coincidence is lost. Therefore, we propose an iterative method, STi, that provides an estimation based on ST but which only requires the knowledge of measurable quantities: prompts and singles. Due to inter-crystal scatter, for wide energy windows ST only partially corrects SR overestimations. While SR deviations are in the range 86-300% (depending on the source geometry), the ST deviations are systematically smaller and contained in the range 4-60%. STi fails to reproduce the ST results, although for not too high activities the deviation with respect to ST is only a few percent. For conventional energy windows, i.e. those without inter-crystal scatter, the ST method corrects the SR overestimations, and deviations from the true random rate are of the order of 1% or less. In addition, in the case of conventional energy window STi results reproduce ST results and therefore the former can be used to obtain the true random rate.
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Bordes, J., Chan, H. M., & Tsun, T. S. (2010). A solution to the strong CP problem transforming the theta angle to the KM CP-violating phase. Int. J. Mod. Phys. A, 25(32), 5897–5911.
Abstract: It is shown that in the scheme with a rotating fermion mass matrix (i.e. one with a scale-dependent orientation in generation space) suggested earlier for explaining fermion mixing and mass hierarchy, the theta angle term in the QCD action of topological origin can be eliminated by chiral transformations, while giving still nonzero masses to all quarks. Instead, the effects of such transformations get transmitted by the rotation to the CKM matrix as the KM phase giving, for theta of order unity, a Jarlskog invariant typically of order 10(-5), as experimentally observed. Strong and weak CP violations appear then as just two facets of the same phenomenon.
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Aguiar, P., Rafecas, M., Ortuño, J. E., Kontaxakis, G., Santos, A., Pavia, J., et al. (2010). Geometrical and Monte Carlo projectors in 3D PET reconstruction. Med. Phys., 37(11), 5691–5702.
Abstract: Purpose: In the present work, the authors compare geometrical and Monte Carlo projectors in detail. The geometrical projectors considered were the conventional geometrical Siddon ray-tracer (S-RT) and the orthogonal distance-based ray-tracer (OD-RT), based on computing the orthogonal distance from the center of image voxel to the line-of-response. A comparison of these geometrical projectors was performed using different point spread function (PSF) models. The Monte Carlo-based method under consideration involves an extensive model of the system response matrix based on Monte Carlo simulations and is computed off-line and stored on disk. Methods: Comparisons were performed using simulated and experimental data of the commercial small animal PET scanner rPET. Results: The results demonstrate that the orthogonal distance-based ray-tracer and Siddon ray-tracer using PSF image-space convolutions yield better images in terms of contrast and spatial resolution than those obtained after using the conventional method and the multiray-based S-RT. Furthermore, the Monte Carlo-based method yields slight improvements in terms of contrast and spatial resolution with respect to these geometrical projectors. Conclusions: The orthogonal distance-based ray-tracer and Siddon ray-tracer using PSF image-space convolutions represent satisfactory alternatives to factorizing the system matrix or to the conventional on-the-fly ray-tracing methods for list-mode reconstruction, where an extensive modeling based on Monte Carlo simulations is unfeasible.
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Belver, D., Cabanelas, P., Castro, E., Garzon, J. A., Gil, A., Gonzalez-Diaz, D., et al. (2010). Performance of the Low-Jitter High-Gain/Bandwidth Front-End Electronics of the HADES tRPC Wall. IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., 57(5), 2848–2856.
Abstract: A front-end electronics (FEE) chain for accurate time measurements has been developed for the new Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC)-based Time-of-Flight (TOF) wall of the High Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer (HADES). The wall covers an area of around 8 m(2) divided in 6 sectors. In total, 1122 4-gap timing RPC cells are read-out by 2244 time and charge sensitive channels. The FEE chain consists of 2 custom-made boards: a 4-channel Daughter BOard(DBO) and a 32-channel MotherBOard (MBO). The DBO uses a fast 2 GHz amplifier feeding a dual high-speed discriminator. The time and charge information are encoded, respectively, in the leading edge and the width of an LVDS signal. Each MBO houses up to 8 DBOs providing them regulated voltage supply, threshold values via DACs, test signals and, additionally, routing out a signal proportional to the channel multiplicity needed for a 1st level trigger decision. The MBO delivers LVDS signals to a multi-purpose Trigger Readout Board (TRB) for data acquisition. The FEE allows achieving a system resolution around 75 ps fulfilling comfortably the requirements of the HADES upgrade [1]. The commissioning of the whole RPC wall is finished and the 6 sectors are already mounted in their final position in the HADES spectrometer and ready to take data during the beam-times foreseen for 2010.
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