An XYE acquisition interface for General Electric Starcam Anger cameras

To support more detailed experimental studies into various scatter correction techniques for single photon imaging studies, an interface was designed and built for acquiring position and energy data from the General Electric Starcam series of scintillation cameras. The interface monitors the main camera data pipeline without disturbing normal camera operations. Data events are latched and presented to a 16-b parallel output port. The 32-b data word is shifted out as two 16-b data words using a simple handshake protocol. If data are not transferred within a preset time, the interface resets and latches a data set. In addition to spatial and energy information, the data word includes information about detector motion and a run time-clock.<>