Basic investigation of data acquisition system for next generation PET scanner

We are under development of a 3D PET scanner with depth of interaction (DOI) capable of high sensitivity and high resolution. In this paper, we estimated the data transfer rate of data acquisition system of this PET scanner by the simulation studies. A maximum data transfer rate of coincidence pair's event information is 10 Mcps and one coincidence event is a 64-bit data format. A data acquisition system, which fulfills the specification of this scanner, is considered for parallel collection with banks including several coincidence units. Simulator of parallel collection system composed of two stand-alone simulators and the server PC. Each stand-alone simulator is composed of data generation PC, data processing circuit, SCSI and data acquisition PC. As the result of simulation studies, the maximum data transfer rate of the stand-alone simulator was 12.0 MB/s, and the maximum data transfer rates at the server PC with one and two nodes were 11.0 and 21.8 MB/s, respectively. Data transfer rate was improved by parameter optimization of a message size and multi-processing of data acquisition software using RAM-DISK.