SiPM applications in positron emission tomography: toward ultimate PET time-of-flight resolution

The development of PET/MRI multimodality, requiring magnetic field immunity the photodetectors associated with an increased demand for time-of-flight capabilities a strong impact on effective PET sensitivity and image quality, has pushed medical imaging community to progressively replace photomultipliers, traditionally used in scanners, by solid-state photodetectors, avalanche diodes (APD) silicon photomultipliers (SiPM). Recent years have seen spectacular progresses performances SiPMs, terms photodetection efficiency (PDE), noise cross talk reduction, timing performance, etc., not mentioning their availability large variety dimensions packages, as single but also linear arrays matrices different sizes. As result this, SiPMs are becoming choice new generation scanners (TOF-PET)