A feasibility study of portable compton camera for metastatic lymph node detection

We are developing a portable Compton camera to be placed inside the human body for local inspection of metabolic functions of metastatic lymph node in gastric cancer. Before fabricating the portable Compton camera, Radioactivity measurement of metastatic and non-metastatic lymph nodes with an injection of FDG was conducted at the University of Tokyo Hospital. The detector that used to measure the radioactivity is composed of a 5mm × 5mm × 5mm GAGG scintillation crystal [2], a Hamamatsu Si-APD, an ASIC and a FPGA and size of the read-out board is 13 × 80 mm. The maximum radioactivity of FDG was about 7kBq. A Monte Carlo simulation result of the portable Compton camera shows that 7kBq phantoms can be imaged within 2 minutes.