Development of Compact, Cost-effective, FPGA-Based Data Acquisition System for the iPET System

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a nuclear medicine imaging technology used to analyze physiological processes. An in-beam PET is used to verify the delivered dose during ion-beam therapy. Our group investigates the prototype C-shaped PET system, which is called the iPET system. In this study, we develop an expendability-enhanced field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based data acquisition system for the iPET. We organize this data acquisition (DAQ) system using only one DAQ board, to ensure a compact and cost-effective DAQ system. We design the FPGA using modular functions, which include synchronization, deserialization, pulse height analysis, and data packaging functions. As a result, energy spectra and well-separated 9 × 9 flood images of the entire detector module are achieved. We obtain reconstructed PET images of point source (4 mm diameter), three cylindrical phantoms (3 cm diameter), and four sphere phantoms (3.0, 2.2, 1.3 and 1.0 cm diameter). We achieve approximately 300 kcps of maximum single count rate. The obtained results prove the compactness and cost-effectiveness of the proposed DAQ system.