Open AccessA front-end readout Detector Board for the OpenPET electronics system
Author(s) -
Woon-Seng Choong,
Faisal T. Abu-Nimeh,
W.W. Moses,
Qiyu Peng,
C. Vu,
Jinyuan Wu
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of instrumentation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.741
H-Index - 84
ISSN - 1748-0221
DOI - 10.1088/1748-0221/10/08/t08002
Subject(s) - field programmable gate array , detector , electronics , computer science , nuclear electronics , computer hardware , electronic engineering , physics , electrical engineering , engineering , telecommunications
We present a 16-channel front-end readout board for the OpenPET electronics system. A major task in developing a nuclear medical imaging system, such as a positron emission computed tomograph (PET) or a single-photon emission computed tomograph (SPECT), is the electronics system. While there are a wide variety of detector and camera design concepts, the relatively simple nature of the acquired data allows for a common set of electronics requirements that can be met by a flexible, scalable, and high-performance OpenPET electronics system. The analog signals from the different types of detectors used in medical imaging share similar characteristics, which allows for a common analog signal processing. The OpenPET electronics processes the analog signals with Detector Boards. Here we report on the development of a 16-channel Detector Board. Each signal is digitized by a continuously sampled analog-to-digital converter (ADC), which is processed by a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to extract pulse height information. A leading edge discriminator creates a timing edge that is "time stamped" by a time-to-digital converter (TDC) implemented inside the FPGA. This digital information from each channel is sent to an FPGA that services 16 analog channels, and then information from multiple channels is processed by this FPGA to perform logic for crystal lookup, DOI calculation, calibration, etc.