The Design And Implementation Of Plug-n-Imaging PET System

PET, as a powerful molecular imaging tool in both clinical usage and biological research, it can assess biological metabolism, biochemical and functional activities in the body, non-invasively and quantitatively, especially in the early diagnosis, treatment planning, curative effect evaluation of cancer, nervous system and cardiovascular disease, has it’s unique application value. The conventional PET system employs a dedicated data acquisition(DAQ) to receive and process all the signals and generate coincidence data. Following an overall design concept, a traditional PET system usually has fixed geometry, every component coupling with other parts, the upgrade of one component may bring the re-development and re-build of the whole system, which greatly limited the flexibility, scalability and upgradability of the system. Nowadays, more and more adaptive application demand are proposed, to meet the individual imaging demands, we often need to build different system or to upgrade some components of the existing PET system, which faces a huge costs.This dissertation proposed a new design architecture named Plug-n-Imaging(Pn I) PET system, consisting of two components: Digital PET detectors and Software in computer. Digital PET detectors detect the gamma ray and produce MVT samples. The software in computer get the interested reconstruction images by DSP. Following this design architecture, based on digital PET detectors our team has developed, we established an extensible software platform for Pn I system, we implemented the basic algorithms of some components like Pulse analysis, coincidence filter, energy resolution and timing resolution estimation, images reconstruction and so on and the package of all module with standard interface definition, also designed several fundamental imaging modality. Based on this Pn I software platform, users can optimize any sub module or personalized choose some sub modules combining with digital PET detectors to build any adaptative geometry systems, according to the application demand. Following this, in this dissertation, we build some small Pn I system quickly, and as an example, we use a panel PET to verify this architecture, which achieved good performance with basic processing module in the software platform.