  The purpose of this study was to show how advanced concepts of compact,
lossless and "Time Of Flight" (TOF) capable electronics similar to those
foreseen for the LHC and ILC experiments could be fairly and easily transferred
to the medical imaging field through Positron Emission Tomography (PET). As a
wish of explanation, the two overriding weaknesses of PET camera readout
electronics, namely dead-time and timing resolution, were investigated
analytically and with a Monte-Carlo simulator presently dedicated to this task.
Results have shown there was room left for count rate enhancement through a
huge decrease of the timing resolution well below the nanosecond. The novel
electronics scheme suggested for PET in this paper has been partly inspired by
the long experience led in High Energy Physics where the latter requirement is
compulsory. Its structure entirely pipelined combined to a pixelation of the
whole detector should allow dead-times to be suppressed, while the absence of
devoted timing channel would remove the preponderant contributions to the
timing resolution. To the common solution for timing would substitute an
optimal filtering method witch clearly appears as a good candidate as timing
resolution of a few tens of picoseconds may be achieved provided the shape of
the signal is known and sufficient samples are available with enough accuracy.
First investigations have yield encouraging results as a sampling frequency of
50 MHz with a 7 bits precision appears sufficient to ensure the 500ps
coincidence timing resolution planed. At this point, there will be a baby step
ahead to draw benefice from a TOF implementation to the design and the enormous
noise variance enhancement that would come with.
