{"doi":"10.1109/trpms.2021.3124756","title":"Investigation of Electronic Signal Processing Chains for a Prototype TOF-PET System With 100-ps Coincidence Time Resolution","abstract":"We have evaluated the coincidence time resolution (CTR) performance of four different mixed-signal front-end electronic readout configurations with the goal to achieve 100 picoseconds (ps) CTR. The proposed TOF-PET detector elements are based on two <inline-formula xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\"> <tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\">$3{\\times } 3{\\times }10$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm <sup xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\">3</sup> “fast LGSO” crystal segments, side coupled to linear arrays of <inline-formula xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\"> <tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\">$3{\\times }3$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm <sup xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\">2</sup> silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), to form a total crystal length of 20 mm. We studied multiple configurations and components for the front-end readout: 1) high speed radio frequency (RF) amplifiers; 2) an ASIC-based discriminator; 3) a combination of RF amplifier, balun transformer, and discriminator ASIC; and 4) combination of balun transformer and discriminator ASIC. Using two <inline-formula xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\"> <tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\">$3{\\times } 3{\\times }10$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm <sup xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\">3</sup> fast LGSO crystals side coupled to a linear array of three SiPMs, coincidence data were experimentally acquired for each readout configuration in combination with a low jitter field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based time-to-digital converter (TDC). After evaluating the timing performance of the three readout schemes, the best CTR value of 99.4 ± 1.9 ps FWHM was achieved for configuration (3), which is more than 20 ps better than the results achieved using configurations (1), (2), and (4).","journal":"IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences","year":2021,"id":177866,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":20,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9596,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":432755,"name":"Andrea González-Montoro","orcid":"0000-0002-7319-4278","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":562103,"name":"Min Sun Lee","orcid":"0000-0002-1442-2285","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":568963,"name":"Joshua W. Cates","orcid":"0000-0002-5649-8691","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":568964,"name":"Jun Yeon Won","orcid":"0000-0001-5760-2545","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":568966,"name":"Jae Sung Lee","orcid":"0000-0001-7623-053X","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":490894,"name":"Craig S. Levin","orcid":"0000-0002-4575-5074","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":568962,"name":"Shirin Pourashraf","orcid":"0000-0001-8013-1171","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":46,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:47:36.112170Z","pmid":"36060422","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}