Demonstration of three-dimensional imaging based on handheld Compton camera

Compton cameras are potential detectors that are capable of performing measurements across a wide energy range for medical imaging applications, such as in nuclear medicine and ion beam therapy. In previous work, we developed a handheld Compton camera to identify environmental radiation hotspots. This camera consists of a 3D position-sensitive scintillator array and multi-pixel photon counter arrays. In this work, we reconstructed the 3D image of a source via list-mode maximum likelihood expectation maximization and demonstrated the imaging performance of the handheld Compton camera. Based on both the simulation and the experiments, we confirmed that multi-angle data acquisition of the imaging region significantly improved the spatial resolution of the reconstructed image in the direction vertical to the detector. The experimental spatial resolutions in the X, Y, and Z directions at the center of the imaging region were 6.81 mm ± 0.13 mm, 6.52 mm ± 0.07 mm and 6.71 mm ± 0.11 mm (FWHM), respectively. Results of multi-angle data acquisition show the potential of reconstructing 3D source images.