Design of a wire-mesh collimator for gamma cameras

This paper presents a model of a wire-mesh collimator for a gamma camera that produces images of comparable quality as those produced with the conventional multihole collimator, but has about half the weight of the multihole collimator. The gamma camera and the collimator are simulated using the MCNPX code. Two final configurations of the wire-mesh collimator are proposed, and their performance is compared with other wire-mesh collimators and with the multihole collimator, using a point source, a planar square source, and two point sources, all in water. In all cases, photons with energy 140 keV are simulated. In addition, we use the simulation of a realistic phantom of a hot tumor in a warm background to assess the performance of our collimator in conjunction with an extended source.