Electronic Systems Design

Nuclear medicine equipment makes use of very specific radiation sensors which need high-end front-end electronics and data acquisition systems. Due to the vast number of outputs provided by these sensors and the processing power needed to manage the huge amount of information, high-tech ad-hoc solutions are needed which cannot be commercially obtained: - Analog front-end electronics, for low level connection with the sensor as well as for an initial preprocessing, has to be integrated in an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). - The high output data rates produced by the sensors need a high speed acquisition system to translate signals to the digital domain where specific processing can be carried out. The use of FPGAs (programmable logic devices) allows modifying algorithms by firmware upgrading. - Three-dimensional image reconstruction algorithms which process information using GPUs (Graphical Processing Units)