Proposal of a real time reconstruction processor for 3-D positron emission tomography

A specialized real-time reconstruction processor for three-dimensional positron emission tomography is proposed. It is based on an expandible SIMD (single-instruction multiple-data) parallel line processor. It is completely parallel and pipelined, and it is based on a bit-serial approach. The architecture, extremely suitable for ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) implementation, has been designed to be compatible with existing tomograph prototypes, but it is easily scalable towards foreseen new solutions. The reconstruction processing time of the single coincidence line is of the order of the address-encoding time (at present 256 ns). The silicon design, in the SOLO 2030+41 environment with ES2 standard cells, is in progress, and it has been validated by simulations performed using the SILOS II simulator