A Building Block for Nuclear Medicine Imaging Systems Data Acquisition

Adapting acquisition electronics to new detector designs has often led to complications and compromises. As we developed depth-of-interaction detector designs based on both discrete crystal arrays (dMiCE) and monolithic crystals (cMiCE) concepts, we found that our previous electronics design was inadequate to the task and launched a design effort we have termed our Phase II electronics. The system is based on a basic card design (the Phase II board) that has a large field programmable gate array (FPGA) with sufficient static RAM to support a variety of pulse processing algorithms our group has developed-including timing estimation, pulse integration with pileup correction, and statistical estimation of the event location in the detector. Here we report on the initial development and testing of the Phase II digital board as a basic building block for data acquisition systems.