Readout technologies for the BNL-UPenn MRI-compatible PET scanner for rodents

We describe the prototype of a full-body PET scanner for rats that is compatible with a 9.4 T MRI system. The detector consists of 96 PET detector blocks in a cylindrical arrangement. In this paper we concentrate on a new readout technology, which takes advantage of the fact that optical fibers are insensitive to electromagnetic interference. The data are formatted in a FPGA on the motherboard and sent to a data acquisition computer through standard Gigabit Ethernet connections. We will describe the technology chosen for the system, and introduce the data acquisition adapted for the readout of the data.