SU-E-I-63: Performance Study of An Electron-Tracking Compton Camera for Medical Imaging

Conventional gamma-ray detector, PET and SPECT, have the limitation of energy and field of view. These limitations are major problems of studying for a new medical imaging. Therefore, we have developed the new imaging detector which is an electron-tracking Compton camera (ETCC).

A reconstruction method of Compton camera (CC) is using the physics principle. Because of using physics principle, CC can have a wide energy dynamic range and wide field of view. Conventional CC, however, cannot catch Compton recoil electron tracks, and this is one of the reasons of low imaging power. We have developed a time projection chamber (TPC) using micro pixel chamber (μPIC) as the new detector for ETCC. The μPIC is 2-dimensional gaseous detector and this position resolution is less than 400 μm. Using this detector, ETCC can get electron tracks which are generated from Compton scattering. In this paper, we show the prototype ETCC performance and imaging results.

ETCC achieved a wide energy dynamic range (200-1300keV) and wide field of view (3 steradian). Also we succeeded in imaging new imaging reagents using mice as follows; (1) F-18-FDG (511 keV) and I-131-MIBG (364 keV) simultaneous imaging for double clinical tracer imaging, (2) Zn-65- porphyrin (1116 keV) imaging for high energy gamma-ray imaging and, (3) imaging of some minerals (Mn-54, Zn-65) in mice and so on. And we succeeded in 3-D imaging which has imaged only one direction using one head camera.

We have developed the ETCC for new medical imaging device and succeeded in imaging the some imaging reagents. We started to develop the new ETCC which can image the mouse within 30 min. Thus, this detector has the possibility of new medical imaging.