A novel scheme of compton imaging for nuclear medicine

Single-Plane Compton Imaging is introduced as a novel scheme of gamma-ray imaging that might overcome basic drawbacks of conventional Anger cameras. It replaces passive collimation by kind of a “soft” electronic collimation based on the Compton kinematics. In contrast to Compton cameras, where individual scattering angles are determined event-by-event from coincident energy depositions in separate detector planes, activity distributions are here reconstructed from accumulated energy spectra. Events to be considered are coincident energy deposition in distinct (preferably adjacent) pixels of a single detection plane, which occur most likely due to Compton scattering in one pixel followed by absorption in the other one. Single-plane Compton imagers (SPCI) could be based on recent detector developments for PET-MRI featuring individual Si-based pixel readouts.