Asymmetric Data Acquisition System for an endoscopic PET-US detector

Abstract

Abstract-According to current prognosis studies of pancreatic cancer, survival rate nowadays is still as low as 6% mainly due to late detections. Taking into account the location of the disease within the body and making use of the level of miniaturization in radiation detectors that can be achieved at the present time, EndoTOFPET-US collaboration aims at the development of a multimodal imaging technique for endoscopic pancreas exams that combines the benefits of high resolution metabolic information from Time-Of-Flight (TOF) Positron Emission Tomography (PET) with anatomical information from ultrasound (US). A system with such capabilities calls for an application-specific high-performance Data Acquisition System (DAQ) able to control and readout data from different detectors. The system is composed of two novel detectors: a PET head extension for a commercial US endoscope placed internally close to the Region-Of-Interest (ROI) and a PET plate placed over the patient's abdomen in coincidence with the PET head. These two detectors will send asymmetric data streams that need to be handled by the DAQ system. The approach chosen to cope with these needs goes through the implementation of a DAQ capable of performing multi-level triggering and which is distributed across two different on-detector electronics and the off-detector electronics placed inside the reconstruction workstation.This manuscript provides an overview on the design of this innovative DAQ system and, based on results obtained by means of final prototypes of the two detectors and DAQ, we conclude that a distributed multi-level triggering DAQ system is suitable for endoscopic PET detectors and it shows potential for its application in different scenarios with asymmetric sources of data. I. INTRODUCTIONOTIVATED by the high mortality rates for pancreatic cancer, the location of the organ under study (close to an open cavity) and current possibilities on detector radiation miniaturization, the EndoTOFPET-US collaboration conceived to create an endoscopic PET scanner in order to provide to physicians with a tool to study newest specific biomarkers for pancreatic and prostatic cancer. This novel scanner aims to push current limitations of whole body PET detectors, making possible detections of millimetric lesions. The standout characteristic of this system is its Region-OfInterest (ROI) specific configuration, which breaks with the traditional whole body scheme thanks to the incorporation of a PET detector head in an endoscopic probe (see Fig. 1). Similar US endoscopic systems in combination with PET scanners are under investigation [2], nevertheless ENDOTOFPET-US is the first scanner that miniaturizes a PET detector to introduced it inside the patient body to cope with the image quality requirements of the application.In order to obtain the intended image quality for early detections, the system user requirements cover several technological challenges: 1 mm image spatial resolution, unprecedented 200 ps Coincidence Time Resolution (CTR) for enhanced back...

Optimized framegrabber for the Cherenkov telescope array

“…For the first case, there are important examples, such as experiments inside particle accelerators, for instance A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS (ATLAS) experiment; 1,2 telescopes, such as Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), 3 Square Kilometer Array (SKA) 4 and SKA's precursor Karoo Array Telescope (MeerKAT), 5 and applications in health sciences. 6 On the other hand, some industrial applications can be found in the framework of Internet of things or Smart Grids. All of these cases correspond with DACQ systems that share distributed sensor networks scattered over the facility.…”