Development of an Improved Detector Module for miniPET-II

We present a new detector module developed for miniPET-II, the second generation of the miniPET small animal PET scanners. The improved module features new hardware components for better performance: LySO crystal material, increased number of crystal segments, Hamamatsu H9500 PSPMT, Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA and Gigabit Ethernet. However, the principle of operation is the same: no hardware coincidence detection is implemented, data is acquired in list mode and transfered over an Ethernet network. The resulting new module is more suitable for full ring configurations.