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

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.