TRANSPUTER-BASED ACQUISITION RECONSTRUCTION SYSTEM AS A DEVELOPMENT TOOL FOR POSITRON-EMISSION-TOMOGRAPHY/

We present an acquisition and reconstruction system for positron emiss ion tomography (PET), to be used as a development tool for testing PET reconstruction algorithms and for detector characteristics studies. I t is based on a transputer network and modular electronics: acquired d ata are stored in memories associated with parallel processors and off line data analysis is performed, allowing for fast comparison of perfo rmances of different reconstruction algorithms. Its simple architectur e and low cost makes it an easy-to-use and convenient tool to test new detectors for PET applications. We introduce here some results obtain ed with two CdZnTe radiation detectors on a rotating ring, as a protot ype example of a small-animal PET camera. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics. [S0034-6748(98)04006-4].