A HOTLink/networked PC data acquisition and image reconstruction system for a high resolution whole-body PET with respiratory or ECG-gated performance

An ultra high resolution PET camera in whole-body scanning or gated imaging study needs super computer-processing power for creating a huge sinogram as well as doing image reconstruction. A real-time HOTLink attached to networked cluster personal computers (PC) has been developed for this special purpose. In general, the coincidence data from a PET camera is unidirectional; therefore an additional daisy-chain bus using high speed HOTLink (400Mbit/s, Cypress Semiconductor, inc.) transmitters and receivers is designed to carry the coincidence data to networked (LAN) computers (PCs). In whole-body scanning, each PC will acquire sinogram data for one bed position, the data from HOTLink is interfaced to a PC through a fast PCI I/O board (80Mbyte/s); and after completion of data acquisition the PC begins to reconstruct the image meanwhile another PC will start data acquisition for the next bed position. The overall architecture for the image acquisition and reconstruction computing system is a pipeline design. The image result from one PC will be sent to a master computer for final tabulation and storage through the standard network, and this PC will be free for processing a new bed position. In gated respiratory or gated ECG imaging study, each PC will be reconfigured for processing a specified time-section image of a respiratory or ECG cycle. We are developing a high resolution PET camera with 38,016 BGO crystal elements which needs 1 to 2 gigabytes sinogram memory; the HOTLink/networked structure design allows us to split the huge sinogram into several PCs in real-time and the image reconstruction can be done in parallel.