• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.80-85
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• 2011

A time-pickoff circuit used for time measurement suffers from a timing error due to the dependence of the generation time of a timing pulse on the size of the input signal, i.e., time walk. In this study, a time-pickoff method, which employs an automatic gain control (AGC) circuit, is proposed for reducing the timing error. The AGC circuit is added to the input of the comparator, and it renders the sizes of input signals of the comparator relatively uniform. The performance of the proposed time-pickoff method is analyzed using the SPICE simulation, and experiments are performed to confirm the analytical results. The measured time walk is reduced to 2.000 ns by 65% for input signals with a dynamic range of 20 dB as compared to a typical leading-edge discriminator.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.8
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• pp.2646-2651
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• 2021

A rectangular-shaped PET system with an adjustable gantry (AGPET) has been developed for imaging small animals. The AGPET system employs a new depth of interaction (DOI) method using a depth dependent reflector patterns and a new digital time pickoff method based on the pulse reconstruction method. To evaluate the performance of the AGPET, timing resolution, intrinsic spatial resolution and point source images were acquired. The timing resolution and intrinsic spatial resolution were measured using two detector modules and Na-22 gamma source. The PET images were acquired in two field of view (FOV) sizes, 30 mm and 90 mm, to demonstrate the characteristic of the AGPET. As a result of in the experiment results, the timing resolution was 0.9 ns using the pulse reconstruction method based on the bi-exponential model. The intrinsic spatial resolution was an average of 1.7 mm and the spatial resolution of PET images after DOI correction was 2.08 mm and 2.25 mm at the centers of 30 mm and 90 mm FOV, respectively. The results show that the proposed AGPET system provided higher sensitivity and resolution for small animal imaging.