Developing a Single Plane Compton Camera for Radionuclide Imaging

Anger cameras are still the primary technology for radionuclide imaging in nuclear medicine [1]. Despite the achieved advances in improving the image quality over the past 60 years since its invention [2], there are physical limits to the camera performance (limited detection efficiency, decreasing spatial resolution of high energetic gamma rays, fixed dependency of the spatial resolution and detection efficiency from the used collimator). In order to overcome these limitations, the concept of the “Single Plane Compton Camera” (SPCC, see also Ref. [3]) was developed. The SPCC is based on the idea of the “Directional Gamma Radiation Detector” published in Ref. [4] and [5]. A setup for the investigation of the SPCC concept was developed recently at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden - Rossendorf. Based on a GAGG:Ce (Gadolinium Aluminum Gallium Garnet, Gd3Al2Ga3O12) scintillator array and read out by digital silicon photomultipliers the setup is intend to deliver spatial information of activity distributions. The authors will present first experimental results acquired with the new setup and will compare them to predictions obtained from particle transport calculations performed with GEANT 4 [6]. [1] S. R. Cherry, J. A. Sorenson and M. E. Phelps, Physics in Nuclear Medicine, 4th ed., Elsevier, 2013. [2] H. Anger, "A new instrument for mapping gamma ray emitters," Biology and Medicine Quaterly Report, 1957. [3] G. Pausch et al., Paper N60-1 presented at the 2016 IEEE NSS/MIC in Strasbourg, France, Conference Record [4] G. Kraft et al., U.S. patent no. 8030617 B2, granted in Oct. 2011 [5] A. Gueorguiev et al. U.S. patent no. 8299441 B2, granted in Oct. 2012 [6] A. Allison, "Geant 4 - a simulation toolkit", Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A. 506, (2003) 250-303