A powerful readout system for high resolution and high efficiency molecular imaging studies of cardiovascular diseases in mice

A portable, compact, individual channel readout system for an array of flat panel multianodes photomultiplier tubes (FPMT) has been developed and tested. Using Hamamatsu H-9500 FPMT the system can handle an area of 20 × 20 cm
²
, with pixel size of 3 × 3 mm
²
, for a grand total of 4096 independent channels. The electronic system uses 64 channel MAROC [9] chips controlled by field programmable gate arrays (FPGA): this gives high compactness, very good signal integrity (and S/N ratio), good power consumption and high flexibility. An high speed USB 2.0 link connects the electronics to an acquisition node. A small animal single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) detector has been equipped with this electronics. Studies of cardiovascular diseases by molecular imaging with radionuclides are in progress. Preliminary results on perfusion measurements on mice are available. Details on the electronic readout system will be given, together with the first laboratory test results.