XRF-Escape Scintillator Footprints for Nuclear Medicine Imaging and Gamma-Ray Spectrometry

The present paper introduces the so-called scintillators footprints, made of schemes showing XRF-escape peaks and their relative emission intensities in the energy range of interest for nuclear medicine SPECT and PET. A footprint describes the suitability of a scintillator for quantitative investigation with the best possible detectabilility. Sixteen scintillation materials have been identified in Literature, characterized by effective atomic number ranging between 22 to 75. The footprints of NaI:Tl and BGO, confirm the best suitability for quantitative spectral analisys at 140.5 keV and 511 keV, respectively. Moreover, for the low-Z eff scintillators like CaF 2 and CMSM, the XRF-escape effect is foresee irrelevant even at 140.5 keV, due to the small energy value of X-ray fluorescences.