Patent ID: 7126126

Claim:
A method of transferring annihilation information from a block comprising N detector channels in a conscious animal positron emission tomography (PET) scanner used to image a portion of a conscious animal, where N is an integer greater than one, an nth detector channel corresponding to a physical location of an nth detector on the block, comprising the steps of: inputting a jth time pulse on an nth detector channel, the nth detector channel being one of the N detector channels, the jth time pulse comprising a jth position in time, corresponding to a time-of-occurrence of a jth event, j being an integer from 1 to J, J representing a total number of events recorded on the block; generating a jth time signal, the jth time signal representing a time-of-occurrence of the jth time pulse, the jth time pulse being asynchronous to a clock signal; generating a jth address signal, the jth address signal comprising an nth address, the nth address representing the nth detector channel recording the jth event, the jth address signal being synchronous to the clock signal; generating a jth detector channel signal, the jth detector channel signal comprising the jth time signal and the jth address signal; generating a composite signal, the composite signal comprising at least one of the J detector channel signals from at least one of the N detector channels; and outputting the composite signal serially over a data link.