Original Article: PDF OnlyPlastic Scintillation Detectors for High Resolution Emission Computed TomographyMcIntyre, John A. Author Information Physics Department, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843. Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography 4(3):p 351-360, June 1980. Buy Abstract The cost of ring tomographs increases rapidly when spatial resolution is improved to 2 mm and better. However, increased cost can be largely avoided by coding the light transmitted from the individual scintillators to the photomultipliers. Unfortunately, there is a factor-of-100 light loss associated with the coding; this loss destroys the pulse height resolution of the pulse spectrum. In addition, the light loss increases the coincidence time resolution of the photomultiplier pulses for inorganic scintillators such as bismuth germanate (BGO). The time resolution can be regained by using plastic scintillators (NE102), and it is shown that the pulse height resolution is unnecessary for cameras with 2 mm resolution. Furthermore, when considering millimeter-sized detectors, (1) detector rings of multiple plastic scintillators can have as good a detection efficiency as BGO, (2) light can be extracted from multiple-scintillator arrays using optical coding methods, (3) cross-talk between plastic scintillators is much smaller than for BGO scintillators, (4) even with the factor-of-100 light loss introduced by the optical coding, the scintillation detection efficiency is about 80% with NE102, (5) an argument is presented that the time required to obtain statistically useful data varies only as the square of the pixel dimension (rather than as the fifth power), and (6) by using multiple ring tomographs there is no loss in sensitivity for pixel sizes down to 2 mm. Optical coding with plastic scintillators appears, then, to make technically practical the construction of ring tomographs with spatial resolutions of 2 mm. © Lippincott-Raven Publishers.
