Abstract:

Objective. 3D-localization of gamma sources has the potential to improve the outcome of radio-guided surgery. The goal of this paper is to analyze the localization accuracy for point-like sources with a single coded aperture camera. Approach. We both simulated and measured a point-like 241Am source at 17 positions distributed within the field of view of an experimental gamma camera. The setup includes a 0.11mm thick Tungsten sheet with a MURA mask of rank 31 and pinholes of 0.08 mm in diameter and a detector based on the photon counting readout circuit Timepix3. Two methods, namely an iterative search including either a symmetric Gaussian fitting or an exponentially modified Gaussian fitting (EMG) and a center of mass method were compared to estimate the 3D source position. Main results. Considering the decreasing axial resolution with source-to-mask distance, the EMG improved the results by a factor of 4 compared to the Gaussian fitting based on the simulated data. Overall, we obtained a mean localization error of 0.77 mm on the simulated and 2.64 mm on the experimental data in the imaging range of 20−100 mm. Significance. This paper shows that despite the low axial resolution, point-like sources in the nearfield can be localized as well as with more sophisticated imaging devices such as stereo cameras. The influence of the source size and the photon count on the imaging and localization accuracy remains an important issue for further research.

Abstract:

Purpose: Handheld gamma cameras with coded aperture collimators are under inves- tigation for intraoperative imaging in nuclear medicine. Coded apertures are a promis- ing collimation technique for applications such as lymph node localization due to their high sensitivity and the possibility of 3D imaging. We evaluated the axial resolutionand computational performance of two reconstruction methods.Methods: An experimental gamma camera was set up consisting of the pixelated semiconductor detector Timepix3 and MURA mask of rank 31 with round holesof 0.08 mm in diameter in a 0.11 mm thick Tungsten sheet. A set of measurements was taken where a point-like gamma source was placed centrally at 21 different positions within the range of 12–100 mm. For each source position, the detector image was reconstructed in 0.5 mm steps around the true source position, resulting in an image stack. The axial resolution was assessed by the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) profile along the z-axis of the stack. Two reconstruction methods were compared: MURA Decoding and a 3D maximum likeli- hood expectation maximization algorithm (3D-MLEM).Results: While taking 4400 times longer in computation, 3D-MLEM yielded a smaller axial FWHM and a higher CNR. The axial resolution degraded from 5.3 mm and 1.8 mm at 12 mm to 42.2 mm and 13.5 mm at 100 mm for MURA Decoding and 3D-MLEM respectively.Conclusion: Our results show that the coded aperture enables the depth estimation of single point-like sources in the near field. Here, 3D-MLEM offered a better axial reso- lution but was computationally much slower than MURA Decoding, whose reconstruc- tion time is compatible with real-time imaging.