Advances in heterostructured scintillators: toward a new generation of detectors for TOF-PET

Objective. Time-of-flight-positron emission tomography would highly benefit from a coincidence time resolution (CTR) below 100 ps: improvement in image quality and patient workflow, and reduction of delivered dose are among them. This achievement proved to be quite challenging, and many approaches have been proposed and are being investigated for this scope. One of the most recent consists in combining different materials with complementary properties (e.g. high stopping power for 511 keV gamma-ray and fast timing) in a so-called heterostructure, metascintillator or metapixel. By exploiting a mechanism of energy sharing between the two materials, it is possible to obtain a fraction of fast events which significantly improves the overall time resolution of the system. Approach. In this work, we present the progress on this innovative technology. After a simulation study using the Geant4 toolkit, aimed at understanding the optimal configuration in terms of energy sharing, we assembled four heterostructures with alternating plates of BGO and EJ232 plastic scintillator. We fabricated heterostructures of two different sizes (3 x 3 x 3 mm(3) and 3 x 3 x 15 mm(3)), each made up of plates with two different thicknesses of plastic plates. We compared the timing of these pixels with a standard bulk BGO crystal and a structure made of only BGO plates (layered BGO). Main results. CTR values of 239 +/- 12 ps and 197 +/- 10 ps FWHM were obtained for the 15 mm long heterostructures with 100 mu m and 200 mu m thick EJ232 plates (both with 100 mu m thick BGO plates), compared to 271 +/- 14 ps and 303 +/- 15 ps CTR for bulk and layered BGO, respectively. Significance. Significant improvements in timing compared to standard bulk BGO were obtained for all the configurations tested. Moreover, for the long pixels, depth of interaction (DOI) collimated measurements were also performed, allowing to validate a simple model describing light transport inside the heterostructure.