Emphasizing Cherenkov Photons From Bismuth Germanate by Single Photon Response Deconvolution

Bismuth germanate (BGO) has been receiving attention again because it is a potential scintillator for future time-of-flight positron emission tomography. Owing to its optical properties, BGO emits a relatively large number of Cherenkov photons after 511 keV gamma-ray interactions, which can enable good coincidence time resolution. Nonetheless, optimally exploiting the Cherenkov emissions can be confounded by scintillation emissions. Thus, we propose a method efficiently emphasizing Cherenkov photon from a detector waveform by deconvolving a single photon response of photodetector. As a proof-of-concept, we perform the deconvolution, and a probability density function (PDF) of BGO was obtained, which is compared to a conventional time correlated single photon counting method. Furthermore, we investigate if the proposed deconvolution can emphasize a faint Cherenkov signal. Consequently, the PDF obtained by the proposed deconvolution shows a good agreement with that obtained using a conventional time correlated single photon counting methods. A coincidence time resolution obtained using the proposed deconvolution is improved by 12% and 43% in FWHM compared to a voltage-based leading edge discriminator for with and without high-frequency readout electronics, respectively. Thus, the proposed deconvolution method can efficiently emphasize Cherenkov photon by lowering the threshold level and improve the timing performance of BGO-based detectors.