A Time-Of-Flight Gamma Camera Data Acquisition System for Hadrontherapy Monitoring

A collimated gamma camera coupled to a beam hodoscope is currently under development within the CLaRyS collaboration to provide ion-range verification during hadrontherapy. We propose a µTCA-based data acquisition (DAQ) system that consists of dedicated front-end boards, a multi-optical DAQ board, a reference clock board and a computer. Several specific developments have been performed in the front-end boards, namely a TDC (time-to-digital converter) based system synchronization, and an adjustable-depth data buffer, a histogram-based fast time-of-flight estimation and an easy adaptation for different applications. All these DAQ developments have been recently tested with reduced-size hodoscope and collimated camera in the Mediterranean Protontherapy Institute in Nice (65 MeV proton beam).