Performance evaluation of the UCL Compton camera

An ongoing project is being carried out to develop a High Purity Germanium (HPGe) Compton camera for medical applications. The Compton camera offers many potential advantages over other imaging modalities used in nuclear medicine. These advantages include a wide field of view, the ability to reconstruct 3D images without tomography, and the fact that the camera can have a portable lightweight design due to absence of heavy collimation. In this paper, the imaging performance of the University College London (UCL) HPGe Compton camera has been experimentally evaluated and reported. The imaging performance with different gamma-ray source energies was evaluated. The measured angular resolutions are 4.2°, 3.5°, and 2.8° ± 0.4 for 356, 511 and 662 keV gamma-ray energies respectively. Images have been taken of a variety of test objects, including line and circular source distributions. This paper summaries the results to date and present the current state of the camera performance.