Firmware Upgrade for the Data Acquisition System of the LabPET Small Animal PET Scanner

Abstract

The LabPET scanner is based on avalanche photodiodes individually read out by free running analog to digital converters, giving it the ability to reach high count rates for individual detection crystals. The actual rate performance depends on the supporting firmware that implements the detection, sampling and processing steps in the host programmable devices. The initial firmware version for the LabPET provided the target performance, but was written for functionality rather than maximum throughput. The upgraded firmware optimizes several parts of the analysis flow and uses pipelining techniques to increase count rate performance by 50%, while utilizing 24% less FPGA logic resources and no hardware modifications.Index Terms-FPGA, pipelining, positron emission tomography (PET), real time signal processing.

NEMA NU-04-based performance characteristics of the LabPET-8™ small animal PET scanner

“…The spatial resolution results for radial and tangential resolutions are in good agreement with those published for the LabPET TM scanner by the University of Sherbrooke group (Bergeron et al 2009a). The slight differences between our and previously published results are due to the difference between acquisition and processing firmware used for generating those results (Tetrault et al 2010), difference in the data acquisition energy window (250-650 keV in our case versus 375-650 keV used in the above referenced study) and the maximum ring difference applied (31 in our case versus 15). It should also be noted that we neglected in our calculations the effects of the size and shape of the source and non-collinearity of positron annihilation.…”