A dual modality ultrasound-gamma system: first preliminary results of the scintigraphic camera

The ECORAD collaboration aims to develop a dual compact camera for acquiring ultrasound and scintigraphic images, in order to get both morphological and functional information on the same device. A final volumetric image containing the fusion information will be provided to the user. Here we present the first simulated results of the scintigraphic camera, achieved by means of the GEANT4 program. The camera is based on a four-segment slant collimator. Each segment is coupled with a planar LaBr3(Ce) scintillator and to a Position Sensitive Photo-Multiplier Tube. We tested two different centroid algorithms for reconstructing the planar images. The 3D information is recovered from the planar images acquired at each position of the rotating collimator by using a simple back-projection algorithm. The proposed approach of a scintigraphic camera based on slant collimators is able to recover the location and the depth of a lesion in a very accurate way.