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Machine learning-assisted event classification in cadmium zinc telluride positron emission tomography detectors leveraging entanglement-informed angular correlations

Bharathi, Praveen Gurunath
Romanchek, Gregory
Shoop, Greyson
King, Michael
Kupinski, Matthew
Furenlid, Lars
Abbaszadeh, Shiva
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UMass Chan Affiliations
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Accepted Manuscript
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2025-12-20
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Abstract

Gamma-positron imaging with tracers that emit a prompt γ (> 511 keV) is vulnerable to Compton down-scatter leaking into the 511-keV window and mimicking true annihilation pairs. Conventional Positron Emission Tomography (PET) systems reconstruct annihilation events without leveraging that the two 511-keV photons are not only orthogonally polarized but also produced in a Bell-entangled state. The polarization correlations of this entanglement imprint themselves in Compton scattering kinematics, particularly the relative azimuthal scattering angle ([Formula: see text]), offering a physics-informed handle for event discrimination. We present a machine-learning framework that exploits these quantum-encoded features to resolve true lines of response (LORs) and reject random coincidences in a dual-panel cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) system. Detected events were categorized into one-photoelectric (1P) and Compton (1C) interaction patterns, yielding four candidate interaction sequences per event. Each event was represented as a 4 × 21 feature matrix comprising spatial coordinates, energy deposits, and angular descriptors, including [Formula: see text] and polar scattering angle θ. Feature ablation with five-fold cross-validation revealed that the combination of energy and [Formula: see text] provided the highest discriminative power (Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (ROC-AUC) 0.87-0.95), followed by energy alone (ROC-AUC 0.85-0.95), while inclusion of spatial coordinates with energy and [Formula: see text] ranked third, achieving consistent performance across folds (ROC-AUC 0.81-0.91). These results demonstrate that incorporating entanglement-sensitive angular features into learning pipelines can suppress prompt contamination while preserving true LORs in a gamma-positron imaging system.

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Bharathi PG, Romanchek G, Shoop G, King M, Kupinski M, Furenlid L, Abbaszadeh S. Machine learning-assisted event classification in cadmium zinc telluride positron emission tomography detectors leveraging entanglement-informed angular correlations. Sci Rep. 2025 Dec 20. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-32951-6. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 41422145.

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10.1038/s41598-025-32951-6
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41422145
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Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.