Design of a coincidence processing board for a dual-head PET scanner for breast imaging

• DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2005.03.018
• Publication Date: 2005-04-08T12:06:54Z
• Authors: J.D. Martínez; J. Toledo; R. Esteve; A. Sebastiá; F.J. Mora; J.M. Benlloch; M.M. Fernández; M. Giménez; E.N. Giménez; Ch.W. Lerche; N. Pavón; F. Sánchez
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 01 natural sciences

This paper describes the design of a coincidence processing board for a dual-head Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner for breast imaging. The proposed block-oriented data acquisition system relies on a high-speed DSP processor for fully digital trigger and on-line event processing that surpasses the performance of traditional analog coincidence detection systems. A mixed-signal board has been designed and manufactured. The analog section comprises 12 coaxial inputs (six per head) which are digitized by means of two 8-channel 12-bit 40-MHz ADCs in order to acquire the scintillation pulse, the charge division signals and the depth of interaction within the scintillator. At the digital section, a state-of-the-art FPGA is used as deserializer and also implements the DMA interface to the DSP processor by storing each digitized channel into a fast embedded FIFO memory. The system incorporates a high-speed USB 2.0 interface to the host computer.