• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.18-27
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• 2015

Since a Compton camera has high detection sensitivity due to electronic collimation and a good energy resolution, it is a potential imaging system for nuclear medicine. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of a Compton camera for multi-tracer imaging and proposed a rotating Compton camera to satisfy Orlov's condition for 3D imaging. Two software phantoms of 140 and 511 keV radiation sources were used for Monte-Carlo simulation and then the simulation data were reconstructed by listmode ordered subset expectation maximization to evaluate the capability of multi-tracer imaging in a Compton camera. And the Compton camera rotating around the object was proposed and tested with different rotation angle steps for improving the limited coverage of the fixed conventional Compton camera over the field-of-view in terms of histogram of angles in spherical coordinates. The simulation data showed the separate 140 and 511 keV images from simultaneous multi-tracer detection in both 2D and 3D imaging and the number of valid projection lines on the conical surfaces was inversely proportional to the decrease of rotation angle. Considering computation load and proper number of projection lines on the conical surface, the rotation angle of 30 degree was sufficient for 3D imaging of the Compton camera in terms of 26 min of computation time and 5 million of detected event number and the increased detection time can be solved with multiple Compton camera system. The Compton camera proposed in this study can be effective system for multi-tracer imaging and is a potential system for development of various disease diagnosis and therapy approaches.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.191-196
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• 2012

A double-scattering type Compton camera which is appropriate to imaging a high-energy gamma source has been developed for nuclear material surveillance at Hanyang University. The double-scattering type Compton camera can provide high imaging resolution; however, it has disadvantage of relatively low imaging sensitivity than existing single-scattering type Compton camera. In this study, we introduce a novel concept of a dual-mode Compton camera which incorporates two different types of Compton camera, i.e., single- and double-scattering type. The dual-mode Compton camera can operate high-resolution mode and high-sensitivity mode in a single system. To maximize its performance, the geometrical configuration was optimized by using Geant4 Monte Carlo simulation toolkit. In terms of imaging sensitivity, high-sensitivity mode had higher sensitivity than high-resolution mode up to 100 times while high imaging resolution of the double-scattering Compton camera was maintained.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.51-61
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• 2009

A Compton camera, which is based on the geometrical interpretation of Compton scattering, is a very promising gamma-ray imaging device considering its several advantages over the conventional gamma-ray imaging devices: high imaging sensitivity, 3-D imaging capability from a fixed position, multi-tracing functionality, and almost no limitation in photon energy. In the present study, a Monte Carlo-based, user-friendly Compton imaging simulator was developed in the form of a graphical user interface (GUI) based on Geant4 and $MATLAB^{TM}$. The simulator was tested against the experimental result of the double-scattering Compton camera, which is under development at Hanyang University in Korea. The imaging resolution of the simulated Compton image well agreed with that of the measured image. The imaging sensitivity of the measured data was 2~3 times higher than that of the simulated data, which is due to the fact that the measured data contains the random coincidence events. The performance of a stacking-structure type Compton camera was evaluated by using the simulator. The result shows that the Compton camera shows its highest performance when it uses 4 layers of scatterer detectors.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.15-24
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• 2011

While Compton imaging is recognized as a valuable 3-D technique in nuclear medicine, reconstructing an image from Compton scattered data has been of a difficult problem due to its computational complexity. The most complex and time-consuming computation in Compton camera reconstruction is to perform the conical projection and backprojection operations. To alleviate the computational burden imposed by these operations, we investigate a rebinning method which can convert conical projections into parallel projections. The use of parallel projections allows to directly apply the existing deterministic reconstruction methods, which have been useful for conventional emission tomography, to Compton camera reconstruction. To convert conical projections into parallel projections, a cone surface is sampled with a number of lines. Each line is projected onto an imaginary plane that is mostly perpendicular to the line. The projection data rebinned in each imaginary plane can then be treated as the standard parallel projection data. To validate the rebinning method, we tested with the representative deterministic algorithms, such as the filtered backprojection method and the algebraic reconstruction technique. Our experimental results indicate that the rebinning method can be useful when the direct application of existing deterministic methods is needed for Compton camera reconstruction.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.10
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• pp.2361-2369
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• 2020

Compton cameras using large scintillators have been developed for high imaging sensitivity. These scintillator-based Compton cameras, however, mainly due to relatively low energy resolution, suffer from undesired background-radiation signals, especially when radioactive materials' activity is very low or their location is far from the Compton camera. To alleviate this problem for a large-size Compton camera, in the present study, a hybrid-type shielding system was designed that combines an active shield with a veto detector and a passive shield that surrounds the active shield. Then, the performance of the hybrid shielding system was predicted, by Monte Carlo radiation transport simulation using Geant4, in terms of minimum detectable activity (MDA), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and image resolution. Our simulation results show that, for the most cases, the hybrid shielding system significantly improves the performance of the large-size Compton camera. For the cases investigated in the present study, the use of the shielding system decreased the MDA by about 1.4, 1.6, and 1.3 times, increased the SNR by 1.2-1.9, 1.1-1.7, and 1.3-2.1 times, and improved the image resolution (i.e., reduced the FWHM) by 7-8, 1-6, and 3-5% for ¹³⁷Cs, ⁶⁰Co, and ¹³¹I point source located at 1-5 m from the imaging system, respectively.

• Biomedical Engineering Letters
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.383-392
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• 2018

For prompt gamma ray imaging for biomedical applications and environmental radiation monitoring, we propose herein a multiple-scattering Compton camera (MSCC). MSCC consists of three or more semiconductor layers with good energy resolution, and has potential for simultaneous detection and differentiation of multiple radio-isotopes based on the measured energies, as well as three-dimensional (3D) imaging of the radio-isotope distribution. In this study, we developed an analytic simulator and a 3D image generator for a MSCC, including the physical models of the radiation source emission and detection processes that can be utilized for geometry and performance prediction prior to the construction of a real system. The analytic simulator for a MSCC records coincidence detections of successive interactions in multiple detector layers. In the successive interaction processes, the emission direction of the incident gamma ray, the scattering angle, and the changed traveling path after the Compton scattering interaction in each detector, were determined by a conical surface uniform random number generator (RNG), and by a Klein-Nishina RNG. The 3D image generator has two functions: the recovery of the initial source energy spectrum and the 3D spatial distribution of the source. We evaluated the analytic simulator and image generator with two different energetic point radiation sources (Cs-137 and Co-60) and with an MSCC comprising three detector layers. The recovered initial energies of the incident radiations were well differentiated from the generated MSCC events. Correspondingly, we could obtain a multi-tracer image that combined the two differentiated images. The developed analytic simulator in this study emulated the randomness of the detection process of a multiple-scattering Compton camera, including the inherent degradation factors of the detectors, such as the limited spatial and energy resolutions. The Doppler-broadening effect owing to the momentum distribution of electrons in Compton scattering was not considered in the detection process because most interested isotopes for biomedical and environmental applications have high energies that are less sensitive to Doppler broadening. The analytic simulator and image generator for MSCC can be utilized to determine the optimal geometrical parameters, such as the distances between detectors and detector size, thus affecting the imaging performance of the Compton camera prior to the development of a real system.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.107-114
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• 2009

A Compton camera, which is based on Compton kinematics, is a very promising gamma-ray imaging device in that it could overcome the limitations of the conventional gamma-ray imaging devices. In the present study, the image quality of a rotating Compton camera was evaluated by using 4-D Monte Carlo simulation technique and the applicability to nuclear industrial applications was examined. It was found that Compton images were significantly improved when the Compton camera rotates around a gamma-ray source. It was also found that the 3-D imaging capability of a Compton camera could enable us to accurately determine the 3-D location of radioactive contamination in a concrete wall for decommissioning purpose of nuclear facilities. The 4-D Monte Carlo simulation technique, which was applied to the Compton camera fields for the first time, could be also used to model the time-dependent geometry for various applications.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Medical Physics Conference
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• 2006.08a
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• pp.125-125
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• 2006

• 대한방사선방어학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2011.11a
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• pp.240-241
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• 2011

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.56-65
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• 2009

Compton imaging is often recognized as a potentially more valuable 3-D technique in nuclear medicine than conventional emission tomography. Due to inherent computational limitations, however, it has been of a difficult problem to reconstruct images with good accuracy. In this work we show that the row-action maximum likelihood algorithm (RAMLA), which have proven useful for conventional tomographic reconstruction, can also be applied to the problem of 3-D reconstruction of cone-beam projections from Compton scattered data. The major advantage of RAMLA is that it converges to a true maximum likelihood solution at an order of magnitude faster than the standard expectation maximiation (EM) algorithm. For our simulations, we first model a Compton camera system consisting of the three pairs of scatterer and absorber detectors placed at x-, y- and z-axes, and generate conical projection data using a software phantom. We then compare the quantitative performance of RAMLA and EM reconstructions in terms of the percentage error. The net conclusion based on our experimental results is that the RAMLA applied to Compton camera reconstruction significantly outperforms the EM algorithm in convergence rate; while computational costs of one iteration of RAMLA and EM are about the same, one iteration of RAMLA performs as well as 128 iterations of EM.