Performance characteristics of a new generation of processing circuits for PET applications

An electronics architecture for a PET camera is presented which utilizes a newly developed ASIC, CFD, and TDC to fully utilize the timing advantages of an LSO scintillation crystal. Measured intrinsic timing resolution for a LSO/PMT detector against plastic/PMT detector is 900 ps FWHM using the newly developed ASIC electronics. The energy and pixel location are derived using continuous sampling ADCs with FPGA digital processing algorithms. Sampled PMT signals are rescaled using the CFD trigger to recalibrate the energy and position since the ADCs are asynchronous with the events. The overall linearity of the energy channels is 1.8% for a 6:1 input dynamic range. The electronics are designed to be compatible with large and small area LSO or BGO detectors used in PET imaging.