Positron emission tomography event stream buffering

Abstract

PET system including array, data processing, and data acquisition. Data acquisition includes one-to-N channel write striping, N-to-one channel read unstriping, N data storage elements, and control logic. Control logic allocates (statically or dynamically) write/read access to data storage elements. Dynamic allocation can be conditional, e.g., that data storage elements be available to receive all input data from array. Embodiments include an input buffer where the condition is determined dynamically based on capacity of the input buffer to temporarily preserve all input data supplied during periods data storage element unavailability. Communication between array and data acquisition can be Fibre Channel simplex implementing only FC-0, FC-1. Data storage elements have data handling bandwidth equal to or greater than (data output rate /N) plus (data input rate/N). Control logic, write striping, read unstriping can be implemented in FPGA. Data storage elements can form a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, e.g., RAID 0.