A high speed PC-based data acquisition and control system for positron imaging

A modular positron camera with a flexible geometry suitable for performing Positron Emission Particle Tracking (PEPT) studies on a wide range of applications has been constructed. The demand for high speed list mode data storage required for these experiments has motivated the development of an improved data acquisition system to support the existing detectors. A high speed PC-based data acquisition system is presented. This device replaces the old dedicated hardware with a compact, flexible device with the same functionality and superior performance. Data acquisition rates of up to 80 MBytes per second allow coincidence data to be saved to disk for real-time analysis or post processing. The system supports the storage of time information with resolution of a half millisecond and remote trigger data support. Control of the detector system is provided by high-level software running on the same computer.