3D-Flow™ DAQ-DSP IBM PC board for photon detection in PET and PET/CT

A data acquisition and processing board has been developed for high efficiency photon detection in PET/CT. The board comprises of sixty-eight 3D-Flow™ processors, each capable of executing up to 26 operations in a single cycle. These processors can execute a programmable real-time algorithm that acquires and processes input data with zero dead-time, that improves the signal-to-noise ratio, and that best extracts the characteristic parameters of the interaction between the incident photon and different types of detectors (slow: Nai(TI), BGO, etc. or fast: LSO, GSO, etc). It can trigger on any electronic channel. It can accurately measure incident photon energy by summing 9, 16, or 25 elements. It can accurately measure the spatial resolution on 3×3 (or 5×5) PMTs. Each processor can execute complex real-time algorithms to accurately measure DOI and eliminate parallax error of oblique photons. Timing is controlled by two in-phase clocks at 20 MHz and 40 MHz (with PLL x8 = 320 MHz internal clock) with a skew <40 ps between any processor clock in the system. A TDC measures arrival time and assigns a time stamp to the photon at each channel with 500 ps resolution. The board has 2,211 components with >20,000 pins connected with about 9,000 nets in a PCB with only 8 layers of signals and 6 layers for power and ground. Only through-hole vias were used to minimize manufacturing cost. The board is suitable for current PET with different detector types and for the 3D-CBS for best PET efficiency improvement.