R. Lecomte et al., A PET CAMERA SIMULATOR WITH MULTISPECTRAL DATA-ACQUISITION CAPABILITIES, IEEE transactions on nuclear science, 40(4), 1993, pp. 1067-1074
The Sherbrooke PET simulator was designed and built to investigate par
ameters which influence the performance of a high resolution PET camer
a based on avalanche Photodiode detectors. The simulator consists of a
computer controlled scanning table with 32 detection channels shared
between front-end cassettes and FASTBUS boards, and of a PC-based mult
ichannel analyzer (MCA) used as an histogramming memory for multi-para
metric data acquisition. Tomographic data am collected by scanning one
of two opposite arrays of detectors and by rotating the object in a p
redetermined sequence to simulate a complete ring of detectors with va
rious sampling schemes. All acquisition parameters, such as detector b
ias, discriminator noise thresholds, timing delays, energy and coincid
ence time windows, are programmable through digital-to-analog converte
rs or on-board registers. Data can be acquired in several modes: calib
ration, where direct or coincident energy spectra from all detectors c
an be registered simultaneously; standard, where only energy-validated
coincident events are histogrammed as lines-of-response (LORs) addres
ses; and multispectral, where the LOR address is encoded with the ener
gy information to provide a multi-parameter histogram. Data samples ob
tained in these modes are presented.