Design of a super fast three-dimensional projection system for positron emission tomography

A hardware architecture for rapid three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction is considered for positron emission tomography (PET). For possibly improved PET performance, obliquely oriented lines of response (LOR) are to be collected and properly utilized by one of several experimental 3D reconstruction algorithms. Image signal-to-noise may improve. Septa removal increases the signal by allowing extra LOR collection but also increases the noise due to reduced shielding against out-of-plane events. Primary utility for all LOR collection and 3D reconstruction algorithms may lie with count starved applications. A major obstacle is the time required to compute the 3D reconstruction. Several hours are required even for general purpose computers capable of several million instructions power second. The bulk of the computations for the various reconstruction algorithms are typically in support of forward and back projection. This paper describes a VLSI based architecture which will support forward and back projection for a 3D image and 4096 2D views totaling over 25 million lines of response projected into 0.5 million voxels