Ethernet based distributed data acquisition system for a small animal PET

We report on the design of a small animal PET scanner being developed at our institutes. The existing setup is the first version of the miniPET machine consisting of four detector modules. Each detector module consists of an 8times8 LSO scintillator crystal block, a position sensitive photomultiplier, a digitizer and digital signal processing board and an Ethernet interface board. There is no hardware coincidence detection implemented in the system, coincidence is determined based on a time stamp attached to every event by a digital CFD algorithm. The algorithm is implemented in the digital signal processing board and it generates a time stamp with a coincidence resolution of 2 to 3 ns. The data acquisition System is based on Ethernet network and is highly scalable in size and performance