Abstract

Major improvements have been made toward medical imaging in the last decades, notably with the development of efficient high energy imaging and the very new developed domain of the optical imaging. In medical imaging, careful control of the doping and point defects of the materials should be realized to optimize the optical properties. Oxide-based scintillator crystals for positron emission tomography (PET) are now very efficient. These materials exhibit the expected requirements for gamma detection scintillators, i.e. high density and high effective atomic number; high scintillation light yield and very short decay time. The impact of point defects such as oxygen vacancies on the scintillation properties has been recently pointed out. It was also observed that co-doping allows an afterglow reduction and a large improvement of the light yield value. With these improvements, last generation of imaging equipment presents outstanding performances which allow a decrease of the irradiation dose received by the patients during medical application and a more accurate diagnostic [1, 2].

© 2015 IEEE