LSO background radiation as a transmission source using time of flight.

LSO scintillators (Lu2Sio5:Ce) have a background radiation which originates from the isotope Lu-176 that is present in natural occurring lutetium. The decay that occurs in this isotope is a beta decay that is in coincidence with cascade gamma emissions with energies of 307,202 and 88 keV. The coincidental nature of the beta decay with the gamma emissions allow for separation of emission data originating from a positron annihilation event from transmission type data from the Lu-176 beta decay. By using the time of flight information, and information of the chord length between two LSO pixels in coincidence as a result of a beta emission and emitted gamma, a second time window can be set to observe transmission events simultaneously to emission events. Using the time when the PET scanner is not actively acquiring positron emission data, a continuous blank can be acquired and used to reconstruct a transmission image. With this blank and the measured transmission data, a transmission image can be reconstructed. This reconstructed transmission image can be used to perform emission data corrections such as attenuation correction and scatter corrections or starting images for algorithms that estimate emission and attenuation simultaneously. It is observed that the flux of the background activity is high enough to create useful transmission images with an acquisition time of 10 min.