Performance comparison and system modeling of a compton medical imaging system and a collimated anger camera

The objective of this research is to compare performance of a well modeled dual-planar silicon-based Compton imaging system with that of a collimated Anger camera for imaging higher energy photons emitted from ¹³¹I using statistical methods. The analysis uses modified uniform Cramer-Rao bound algorithms we developed and verified along with Monte Carlo calculations and system modeling. Calculations show that the effect of Doppler broadening is the limiting factor for Compton camera performance for imaging 364.4keV photons emitted from ¹³¹I. The performance of the two systems was compared and analyzed by simulating a two dimensional disk with uniform activity for the same number of detected events. The performance of the proposed Compton imaging system is superior to the collimated Anger camera especially as the desired spatial resolution is better than 12mm FWHM. The ratio of the lower bounds for the two systems at 5mm and 10mm desired point source response is 1000 and 15, respectively in favor of the Compton device. Moreover, the detection sensitivity of the proposed Compton imaging system is 15–20 times higher than the collimated Anger camera.