Compton Imaging for Medical Applications

Compton imaging devices employ electronic collimation to determine the direction of photons coming from a radio-tracer labeled organ. They therefore not subject to the limiting constraint imposed by mechanical collimators, for which sensitivity and spatial resolution are inversely coupled. As a result,the sensitivity can be dramatically increased for a comparable resolution. Furthermore, their performance improve rapidly with increasing photon energy, making possible to achieve spectacular gains over conventional mechanical collimation. simulations predict a great improvement over existing devices. A first prototype has been built, and images have been reconstructed. The results prove the feasibility of this technique nad its implementation using silicon detectors as electronic collimators. (Author) 5 refs