An energy-subtraction Compton scatter camera design for in vivo medical imaging of radiopharmaceuticals

A Compton scatter camera (CSC) design is proposed for imaging radioisotopes used as biotracers. A clinical version may increase sensitivity by a factor of over 100, while maintaining or improving spatial resolution, as compared with existing Anger cameras that use lead collimators. This novel approach is based on using energy subtraction (/spl Delta/E=E/sub 0/-E/sub SC/, where E/sub 0/, /spl Delta/E, and E/sub SC/ are the energy at the emitted gamma ray, the energy deposited by the initial Compton scatter, and the energy of the Compton scattered photon) to determine the amount of energy deposited in the primary system. The energy subtraction approach allows the requirement of high energy resolution to be placed on a secondary detector system instead of the primary detector system. Requiring primary system high energy resolution has significantly limited previous CSC designs for medical imaging applications. Furthermore, this approach is dependent on optimizing the camera design for data acquisition of gamma rays that undergo only one Compton scatter in a low-Z primary detector system followed by total absorption of the Compton scattered photon in a high-Z secondary detector system. The proposed approach allows for a more compact primary detector system, a more simplified pulse processing interface, and a much less complicated detector cooling scheme as compared with previous CSC designs. Analytical calculations and Monte Carlo simulation results for some specific detector materials and geometries are presented.