Development of GUI-based Compton Imaging Simulator with Timing Characteristics of Compton Camera

Abstract

The Compton camera has a great potential to be a high-performance imaging device in nuclear medicine and industrial applications for its unique advantages including 3-D imaging capability without requiring multi-directional data acquisitions, high imaging sensitivity, multi-tracing capability, and wide field-of-view. The performance of a Compton camera is affected by the timing characteristics of the detectors and data acquisition electronics mainly because Compton imaging is based on coincidence detection. The timing characteristics, however, are usually neglected in Compton camera simulation, resulting in large errors in imaging sensitivity and less but still significant errors in imaging resolution. In the present study, the timing characteristics of the detectors and data acquisition electronics are explicitly modeled and added to the developing Compton imaging simulator (CIS) for more accurate simulation of a Compton camera, and the upgraded CIS was tested against the experimental results. The timing characteristics modeled in the present study include the detector time resolution, detector deadtime, coincidence window, and artificial system dead-time. Compared with the previous simulation results which did not includes the timing characteristics, the discrepancies of imaging sensitivities, between simulation and experiment, were reduced to an insignificant level. The imaging resolutions were also in a good agreement, i.e., < 1 mm FWHM of difference, after explicitly modeling the timing characteristics. Our results show that the new simulator produces much more accurate results both for imaging sensitivity and imaging resolution. This user-friendly GUI-based simulator will significantly reduce the time and efforts to simulate the Compton camera in the future.