Within the Crystal Clear Collaboration a modular system for a small animal PET scanner (ClearPET TM ) has been developed. The modularity allows the assembly of scanners of different sizes and characteristics in order to fit the specific needs of the individual member institutions. Now a first demonstrator is being completed in Jülich. The system performs depth of interaction detection by using a phoswich arrangement combining LSO and LuYAP scintillators which are coupled to multi-channel photomultipliers (PMTs). A free-running ADC digitizes the signal from the PMT and the complete scintillation pulses are sampled by an FPGA and sent with 20 MB/s to a PC for preprocessing. The pulse provides information about the gamma energy and the scintillator material which identifies the interaction layer. Furthermore, the exact pulse starting time is obtained from the sampled data. This is important as no hardware coincidence detection is implemented. All single events are recorded and coincidences are identified by software. An advantage of that is that the coincidence window and the dimensions of the field of view can be adjusted easily.The ClearPET TM demonstrator is equipped with 10240 crystals on 80 PMTs. This paper presents an overview of the data acquisition system.

The ClearPET initiative is a project being undertaken by working groups of the Crystal Clear Collaboration (CCC). Its aim is to develop a second-generation high performance small animal positron emission tomograph. The ClearPET camera is expected to provide both high sensitivity and high spatial resolution. It uses a phoswich arranging combining two types of lutetium-based scintillator materials: LSO and LuYAP:Ce. Based on the same detector modules different designs from each collaboration partner are realized for their associated medical institutes. Each dedicated version is expressed by the name ClearPET plus an extension.The ClearPET Neuro scanner is a dedicated small animal scanner to allow measurements of signal transduction in nonhuman primates under physiological conditions. This scanner is build by working groups of the Research Center Jülich (FZJ). The gantry allows rotation of the detector modules as well as tilting by 90 degrees to measure non-human primates in an upright sitting position. The opening diameter of the ring is variable between 130mm and 300mm, the axial detector length is 110mm.

No abstract

No abstract