Next Generation PET for Human Brain Study

Conceptual design of the next generation PET with both high sensitivity and high spatial resolution has been performed. A detector unit using a depth encoding scheme was designed and constructed for trial. The unit consists of four Gd$_2$SiO$\sub$5/:Ce crystal blocks in a 2x2x4 array coupled to a position-sensitive photomultiplier tube having metal channel dynodes and 4x4 multi-anodes. Our proposed detector is a very reliable and simple solution suitable for volume PET devices since the proposed depth encoding scheme does not need additional photo-detectors.