A Monte Carlo evaluation of three Compton camera absorbers.

We present a quantitative study on the performance of cadmium zinc telluride (CZT), thallium-doped sodium iodide (NaI(Tl)) and germanium (Ge) detectors as potential Compton camera absorbers. The GEANT4 toolkit was used to model the performance of these materials over the nuclear medicine energy range. CZT and Ge demonstrate the highest and lowest efficiencies respectively. Although the best spatial resolution was attained for Ge, its lowest ratio of single photoelectric to multiple interactions suggests that it is most prone to inter-pixel cross-talk. In contrast, CZT, which demonstrates the least positioning error due to multiple interactions, has a comparable spatial resolution with Ge. Therefore, we modelled a Compton camera system based on silicon (Si) and CZT as the scatterer and absorber respectively. The effects of the detector parameters of our proposed system on image resolution were evaluated and our results show good agreement with previous studies. Interestingly, spatial resolution which accounted for the least image degradation at 140.5 keV became the dominant degrading factor at 511 keV, indicating that the absorber parameters play some key roles at higher energies. The results of this study have validated the predictions by An et al. which state that the use of a higher energy gamma source together with reduction of the absorber segmentation to sub-millimetre could achieve the image resolution of 5 mm required in medical imaging.

GEANT4 simulation of the effects of Doppler energy broadening in Compton imaging.

A Monte Carlo approach was used to study the effects of Doppler energy broadening on Compton camera performance. The GEANT4 simulation toolkit was used to model the radiation transport and interactions with matter in a simulated Compton camera. The low energy electromagnetic physics model of GEANT4 incorporating Doppler broadening developed by Longo et al. was used in the simulations. The camera had a 9 × 9 cm scatterer and a 10 × 10 cm absorber with a scatterer to-absorber separation of 5 cm. Modelling was done such that only the effects of Doppler broadening were taken into consideration and effects of scatterer and absorber thickness and pixelation were not taken into account, thus a 'perfect' Compton camera was assumed. Scatterer materials were either silicon or germanium and the absorber material was cadmium zinc telluride. Simulations were done for point sources 10 cm in front of the scatterer. The results of the simulations validated the use of the low energy model of GEANT4. As expected, Doppler broadening was found to degrade the Compton camera imaging resolution. For a 140.5 keV source the resulting full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM) of the point source image without accounting for Doppler broadening and using a silicon scatterer was 0.58 mm. This degraded to 7.1 mm when Doppler broadening was introduced and degraded further to 12.3 mm when a germanium scatterer was used instead of silicon. But for a 511 keV source, the FWHM was better than for a 140 keV source. The FWHM improved to 2.4 mm for a silicon scatterer and 4.6 mm for a germanium scatterer. Our result for silicon at 140.5 keV is in very good agreement with that published by An et al.