An ISPA-camera for γ-rays in nuclear medicine

The ISPA (imaging silicon pixel array)-tube is a position-sensitive photon detector. Originally developed for HEP applications, it can also be envisaged for biomedical applications. By coupling it to scintillating crystals or crystal arrays (YAP) we built a γ-camera and detected through a collimator the 122 keV γ-rays from a 57Co source. This paper presents the results obtained with two different ISPA-tube prototypes: the first ISPA-tube, having a glass fibre optic input window, allows to achieve very high spatial resolutions; the second ISPA-tube prototype, with its non fibre optic quartz input window, leads to much better energy resolutions while preserving sub-millimetric spatial resolutions. (orig.)