Depth-of-interaction and other high order moments filtering for improved detection in thick scintillation crystals

摘要

Radiation from a subject (18) which is received by a scintillation crystal (12) interacts with the scintillation crystal to produce a burst of scintillation light photons. The depth distribution at which the interaction occurs varies in accordance with the energy of the received radiation. Low-energy radiation tends to interact at a shallow depth relative to a front face of the scintillation crystal and radiation with a high energy tends to interact relatively deeply into the crystal. A moment processor (20) processes electronic information from photomultiplier tubes (14) which view the scintillation crystal to generate zero-th moment or energy information, first moment or coordinate information and second moment or depth information. The event information is filtered (34, 62, 66, 82) in accordance with depth (26), e.g., sorted into acceptable/unacceptable information, information corresponding to each of two or more energies of radiation, and the like.