Patent ID: 7676070

Claim:
A device for on-line histogramming of data acquired in a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan, said device comprising: at least one peripheral component interconnect (PCI) card configured to function as one of a gating buffer, a histogramming device, and a normalization buffer, said at least one PCI card including: a field programmable gate array (FPGA); at least one memory device in communication with said FPGA; wherein said memory device included a plurality of DRAM devices, wherein each DRAM device is independently in communication with said FPGA, whereby independent and simultaneous direct memory access (DMA) to each of said plurality of DRAM devices is permitted; at least one input/output (I/O) device in communication with said FPGA; and a first in first out (FIFO) memory chip in communication with the FPGA; wherein at least one said PCI card us configured to function as a gating buffer in which: said DRAM devices defines a first dedicated DRAM bank and a second dedicated DRAM bank, and an arriving PET data packet stream is alternately written into said first dedicated DRAM bank and said second dedicated DRAM bank, while data previously written into the other of said first dedicated DRAM bank and said second dedicated DRAM bank is being read.