Development of a high efficiency and high resolution Compton probe for prostate imaging

The ability to diagnose early prostate cancer has outpaced imaging methods for accurate localization and staging of the disease. A precise determination of the extent of local disease is difficult and, unfortunately, present imaging instrumentation employing radiotracer techniques (PET, SPECT, planar scintigraphy) is limited in its ability to provide detailed information when imaging the prostate due to modest spatial resolution, often poor counting efficiency, and photon attenuation. The innovation in the work described here is the use of a silicon prostate probe based on the principle of the Compton scatter camera. Simulation studies show that the endorectal prostate probe will enhance the spatial resolution by a factor 4–5 and, simultaneously, provide a gain in efficiency of a factor 16–40 over conventional nuclear medicine cameras. The ongoing tasks are focused on the design optimization of a Compton probe prototype.