Applications of high speed digitizer systems in nuclear medicine imaging applications

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Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is an important medical imaging modality in the clinical diagnosis and staging of cancer and neurodegenerative conditions. Development of next generation PET imaging systems requires scalable and high performance data acquisition systems to capture the signals coming from the scintillation detectors used in the PET system and process them in real-time to reduce the data to a simple and concise form. The performance and image quality of PET imaging system is directly related to the quality of this data capture. Nutaq Inc. of Quebec City has an established track record on innovation in the development of digital signal processing hardware and software systems and has recently begun to see their data acquisition systems used in PET imaging applications. Nutaq has identified the field of PET imaging as an area of potential growth and has proposed to work with Dr. Goertzen's University of Manitoba based PET research group to expand their company presence in the area of PET data acquisition systems. The goal of this collaboration will be to develop a set of PET specific data acquisition firmware and software tools for the Nutaq hardware platform that allows new end users to rapidly acquire initial data from common PET detector designs. These tools will then be used to extensively characterize the performance of the Nutaq platform in order to define future development directions. Finally, the firmware and tools will be packaged into a tutorial package aimed at new users. We anticipate that developing this tutorial package will enhance the experience of future users of the Nutaq systems for PET data capture by minimizing the time required to capture their initial proof-of-concept data sets. In addition, the in-depth assessment of the system performance will allow defining areas of hardware improvement for future design revisions. These outcomes will lead to Nutaq having an enhanced presence in the field of PET data acquisition.