Design considerations for a single tube gamma camera

It is pointed out that many potentially practical applications for nuclear medicine diagnostic procedures are difficult or impossible to perform because of the physical size of existing mobile gamma cameras. With the commercial availability of position sensitive photomultiplier tubes (PSPMTs) the development of an instrument ideally suited to these applications now appears to be practical. The major components necessary to construct such a camera have been tested, and a circuit configuration designed to provide a high level of clinical performance in such a device is proposed. Spatial resolution and linearity data from a developmental prototype are provided. Measurements have shown that by using conventional sum and difference analog circuits only, a 76-mm/sup 2/ PSPMT has good linearity and therefore uniformity of sensitivity over only the central 60% of its absolute field of view. It is believed that this high-quality imaging area can be increased to virtually the full field of view by implementing a digital geometric correction scheme using a position vector lookup table.<
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