A scintillation detector which includes a plurality of discrete
scintillators composed of one or more scintillator materials. The discrete
scintillators interact with incident radiation to produce a quantifiable
number of photons with characteristic emission wavelength and decay time.
A light guide is operatively associated with the scintillation crystals
and may be either active or non-active and segmented or non-segmented
depending upon the embodiment of the design. Photodetectors are provided
to sense and quantify the scintillation light emissions. The process and
system embodying various features of the present invention can be utilized
in various applications such as SPECT, PET imaging and simultaneous PET
systems. In accordance with the present invention, the detector array of
the present invention incorporates either a single scintillator layer of
discrete scintillators or discrete scintillators composed of two stacked
different layers that can be the same scintillator material or of two
different scintillator materials. In either case the different layers are
composed of materials that have distinctly different decay times. The
variants in these figures are the types of optical detectors which are
used, i.e. photomultipliers and/or photodiodes, whether or not a segmented
optical light guide is used, and whether the light guide is active or
non-active. If a segmented optical light guide is used then the variant is
whether the configuration is inverted or non-inverted.