A Spartan3E-based low-cost system for gamma-ray detection in small single photon emission computed tomography or positron emission tomography systems

The development and assessment of a readout system based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) for dedicated nuclear medicine cameras is presented. We have used Xilinx Spartan3E starter kit, which is one of the simplest FPGA evaluation boards. The aim of this work is to offer a simple, open source, data acquisition tool, which provides accurate results for nuclear imaging applications. The system has been evaluated using three different experimental setups: pulses from two position-sensitive photo-multipliers (PSPMTs) and a silicon photo-multiplier (SiPM) were recorded, using (99m)Tc sources. Two dual channel, external, 12 bit analog to digital converters with a sampling rate of 1 Msps per channel were used. The tool was designed using Xilinx's embedded development kit and was based in Xilinx's Microblaze soft-core processor. A reference multiparameter-based data acquisition system using nuclear instrumentation modules was used for the evaluation of the proposed system. A number of tests were carried out to assess different algorithms for pulse maximum estimation and Gaussian fitting provided optimal results. The results have shown that the FPGA data acquisition system (i) provides accurate digitization of the PSPMT anode signals under various conditions and (ii) gives similar energy spectra when SiPMs are used