An analytical model of optical photon transportation for monolithic PET detector

Monolithic scintillator detector have been shown to provide better energy resolution and sensitivity without degrading the spatial resolution [1], But 3D position information extraction is much more complicated compared to discrete scintillator detector. 3D maximum likelihood-based approach and artificial neural network (ANN) method are widely used to extract position information [2]. However both methods need reference or training data sets measured from experiments. An analytical model to characterize the optical photon transportation process in the crystal can eliminate the measurement procedure and provide better positioning algorithm.