PETonCHIP: architecture of a high-resolution, fully digital positron emission tomography scanner for small animal imaging

Proceeding of: 2007 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record (NSS'07), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, Oct. 27 - Nov. 3, 2007Small animal PET systems based on a reduced number of rotating planar detectors have advantages in terms of cost/performance for high resolution imaging. The huge integration capability of current semiconductor technologies has favoured miniaturization and popularised the concept of system on a chip. Following this trend, this work attempts to integrate in a single chip the acquisition electronics and coincidence unit of a fully digital four-head PET scanner. The proof of concept is based on commercially available industrial modules, including a FPGAbased high speed acquisition board combined with a rackable computer, both in 6U cPCI form. The four acquisition digital blocks, coincidence logic and communication interface take up close to 30% of the available resources of the FPGA, providing margin for improvement in the system under development.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science through the FPU grant program as well as by the CDTEAM consortium as part of the CENIT Spanish research plan