Design and Fabrication of Endoscope-Type Compton Camera and Its Real Time Imaging System

Nowadays intra-operative diagnosis has getting a lot of attention with remarkable progresses of not only endoscopy but also endoscopic surgery. Endoscope has becoming a incredibly versatile tool, but whose diagnostic role is limited to only visualize anatomically, for instance, inner surface of organs and tumors with optical inspection or ultra sounds. Thus, in order to also visualize functionally, we have proposed and designed the endoscope coupled with radiation detectors, and its intra-operative radiation imaging system, which is based on Compton camera composed of two array-type semiconductor detectors, a Si array and a CdTe array, whose sizes are less than 10mm x 10mm, and a digital signal-processing unit with ASIC and FPGA, and analytical reconstruction algorithm using spherical harmonics, which can provide reconstruction images in real time. Numerical simulation to estimate the feasibility of the proposed system was conducted, its results indicate that spatial resolution of the proposed Compton camera is about 3mm for objects located at 10mm distance between the source location and the detector, and efficiency and sensitivity are about 0.03% and 0.1 cps/kBq at 60s imaging for cylindrical hot/cold phantom, respectively.