A PET camera simulator with multispectral data acquisition capabilities

Abstract

The Sherbrooke positron emission tomography (PET) simulator was designed and built to investigate parameters which influence the performance of a high-resolution PET camera based on avalanche photodiode detectors. The simulator consists of a computer controlled scanning table with 32 detection channels shared between front-end cassettes and FASTBUS boards, and of a PC-based multichannel analyzer (MCA) used as a histogramming memory for multiparametric data acquisition. Tomographic data are collected by scanning one of two opposite arrays of detectors and by rotating the object in a predetermined sequence to simulate a complete ring of detectors with various sampling schemes. All acquisition parameters are programmable through digital-to-analog converters or onboard registers. Data can be acquired in several modes: calibration, where direct or coincident energy spectra from all detectors can be registered simultaneously; standard, where only energy-validated coincident events are histogrammed as lines-of-response addresses; and multispectral, where the LOR address is encoded with the energy information to provide a multiparameter histogram. Data samples obtained in these modes are presented.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>