Design and fabrication of endoscope-type Compton camera

We are constructing an endoscope coupled with a Compton camera to intra-operatively inspect early stage cancer and metastatic lymph node (5 mm–10 mm). The radiation imaging system is composed of pixelated semiconductor detectors, which are Si array and CdTe array, whose sizes are less than 10 mm×10 mm, and a digital signal-processing unit with ASIC and FPGA and reconstruction algorithm using spherical harmonics that can compute in real time. In this paper, we show some simulation results on the performance of the proposed prototype detector using EGS5, Monte Carlo simulation code. The FWHM of 1 mm spatial resolution for an object located 10 mm away from the detector surface and the intrinsic efficiency of 0.05% were observed. Imaging and data acquisition time to take fine images are just 1 min. It therefore can be considered that the endoscopic Compton camera is useful for intra-operative inspection.