Assessment of a new scintillation crystal (LaBr3) in PET scanners using Monte Carlo method

The main aim of this work is to investigate the use of new lanthanum bromide (LaBr3) in whole body PET (WB-PET) scanners and to compare the obtained results with those for BGO and LSO crystals which are currently used in conventional and dedicated PET systems. Our results show that there is a gain in noise effective count rate (NECR) arising from the reduced scatter and random fractions in a LaBr3 scanner. The spatial resolution of the WB-PET with LaBr3 is slightly worse than the LSO and BGO crystals because of its low density and effective atomic number. But our study showed the increased NECR, excellent energy resolution and low decay time of LaBr3 which promise a significant improvement in WB-PET performances especially for narrow coincidence windows.