Proving the Concept of Single Plane Compton Imaging for Radionuclide and Prompt Gamma-Ray Imaging

The paper reports on first attempts to prove the concept of Single Plane Compton Imaging (SPCI), recently proposed on the basis of simulations, in practice. SPCI combines electronic collimation as known from conventional Compton cameras with a much simpler detector design: Multiple scintillator pixels are arranged alongside in a single detection plane. Imaging information is encoded in a set of ‘conditional’ spectra meaning energy deposition distributions in single pixels obliged with the condition of a coincident detection in another (adjacent) pixel. The activity distribution is iteratively reconstructed from the measured projections (the bin contents of the conditional spectra) by using Maximum Likelihood Expectation Maximization (MLEM) algorithms.
This concept has been approached experimentally with two distinct setups addressing the application fields of radionuclide imaging in nuclear medicine, and of prompt-gamma based range verification in radiooncology with proton beams. The first setup consists of a 4×4 array of about 7 × 7 × 20 mm3 GAGG scintillator pixels read out with a Philips STEK module comprising 4×4 digital silicon photomultiplier dies. Data were taken with radioactive point sources arranged in few-cm distance from the scintillator pixels. The second setup consists of much larger monolithic cerium bromide scintillation detectors arranged head-to-head in pairs. Those were exposed to prompt gamma radiation produced by a 90 MeV proton beam in a beam-stopping polymethyl acrylate (PMMA) target. Though data analyses are not yet finished, the effects enabling imaging are clearly visible. Preliminary plots exemplify the applicability of SPCI in both applications. The experimental activities have been closely accompanied with appropriate modeling using the Geant4 toolkit