A firewire based data acquisition system for small volume positron emission tomographs

Our laboratory has developed a data acquisition system (eMiCES) for small animal positron emission tomography scanners (PET) and other special purpose detector systems for radiotracer imaging applications. For our applications, the electronics had to be able to be mountable inside a rotating gantry. The resulting design consists of a series of modules that can be tailored for individual applications. The modules include a signal conditioning board (that can include analog signal summing), an analog processing board (digitization, integration, time stamping, and other pulse processing functions), and a communications board to the host computer via the 1394a bus (Firewire). The design takes advantage of the considerable commercial development of Firewire tools in the kernels of Microsoft and Apple computer operating systems. The various electronics modules also make extensive use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) for time stamping, pulse integration, and coincidence processing. Our current application of the system is for our small animal PET scanner (MiCES) with 72 detector modules organized as 36 Firewire nodes