Patent ID: 7557350

Claim:
A diagnostic imaging apparatus including: a subject support adapted to support a subject in an imaging bore, which subject is injected with a radiopharmaceutical which undergoes radiation events which emit concurrent gamma radiation pairs; a cylinder of radiation detectors surrounding the bore to detect the radiation pairs, the detectors each being included in a corresponding one of a plurality of electronic detector channels which have non-uniform time varying drift; at least one calibration radiation source that undergoes radiation events which concurrently emit radiation pairs, the at least one calibration radiation source being disposed inside of the cylinder of radiation detectors and outside of the subject; a coincidence detector which determines whether pairs of detected radiation events occurred within a selected coincidence window; a listmode storage that stores detection locations and the relative detection times of each coincident pair from the coincidence detector; a correction processor that determines temporal corrections to the determined relative detection times of the coincident pairs from the subject radiopharmaceutical in accordance with the determined relative detection times of the detected radiation events of the coincident pairs received from the at least one calibration radiation source, and that adjusts relative detection times of the subject radiopharmeceutical stored in the listmode storage; a time-of-flight detector which examines the corrected relative detection times of the detected radiation events of each of the coincident pairs from the subject radiopharmaceutical to determine where along a ray between the detection locations of each coincident pair one of the radiation events occurred; a ray segment processor that determines a ray segment corresponding to each coincident pair from the subject radiopharmaceutical in accordance with the detection locations and where along each ray a corresponding radiation event occurred; a reconstruction processor which reconstructs an image representation based on the ray segments.