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. 2014 May;61(3):1084-1091.
doi: 10.1109/TNS.2014.2308284. Epub 2014 May 20.

Development and characterization of a round hand-held silicon photomultiplier based gamma camera for intraoperative imaging

Kosta Popovic  1 , Jack E McKisson  2 , Brian Kross  2 , Seungjoon Lee  2 , John McKisson  2 , Andrew G Weisenberger  2 , James Proffitt  3 , Alexander Stolin  4 , Stan Majewski  5 , Mark B Williams  6
Affiliations

Development and characterization of a round hand-held silicon photomultiplier based gamma camera for intraoperative imaging

Kosta Popovic et al. IEEE Trans Nucl Sci. 2014 May.

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a hand-held gamma camera for intraoperative surgical guidance that is based on silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) technology. The camera incorporates a cerium doped lanthanum bromide (LaBr3:Ce) plate scintillator, an array of 80 SiPM photodetectors and a two-layer parallel-hole collimator. The field of view is circular with a 60 mm diameter. The disk-shaped camera housing is 75 mm in diameter, approximately 40.5 mm thick and has a mass of only 1.4 kg, permitting either hand-held or arm-mounted use. All camera components are integrated on a mobile cart that allows easy transport. The camera was developed for use in surgical procedures including determination of the location and extent of primary carcinomas, detection of secondary lesions and sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB). Here we describe the camera design and its principal operating characteristics, including spatial resolution, energy resolution, sensitivity uniformity, and geometric linearity. The gamma camera has an intrinsic spatial resolution of 4.2 mm FWHM, an energy resolution of 21.1 % FWHM at 140 keV, and a sensitivity of 481 and 73 cps/MBq when using the single- and double-layer collimators, respectively.

Keywords: Biomedical imaging; Gamma-ray detectors; Instrumentation and measurement.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Hamamatsu MPPC arrangement of 80 units (top); round PC board connected to the readout system (bottom left) and thickness measurement (~ 5 mm) of the printed circuit board with mounted MPPCs (bottom right).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Map of five regions of 16 MPPCs. The colors identify the five regions, each powered by a separate SIP90 power supply. The MPPCs of each region are numbered for clarity.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Schematic of data-acquisition hardware used to read out the SiPM gamma camera.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Parallel-hole collimator with the magnetic locking mechanism on the edges (one layer shown).
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Theoretical collimator efficiency and resolution versus the hole size at fixed septal penetration and hole pitch.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
The calculated efficiency and resolution trade-off for changing overall hole length at fixed hole size of 0.6 mm and hole pitch of 1.0 mm, with marked single- and double-layer collimator options.
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Demonstration of hand-held operation of the gamma camera.
Fig. 8
Fig. 8
Custom phantom holding perpendicular layers of parallel capillaries filled with 99mTc-pertechnetate solution at fixed pitch of 10 mm.
Fig. 9
Fig. 9
Experimental and theoretical values of the gamma camera's FWHM spatial resolution.
Fig. 10
Fig. 10
Display of the Kmax-based data-acquisition user interface. Shown is a flood image with several user-defined ROIs (left) and their respective energy spectra (right). The full-FOV not-normalized energy spectrum is shown in the top left histogram and Region 0 to 4 histograms correspond to bottom, left, middle, right and top ROI energy spectra respectively. The distortion from a regular circular active area seen in the top right of the flood image is caused by the failure of one of the MPPCs.
Fig. 11
Fig. 11
Barrel distortion is apparent in the raw gamma camera image of the phantom shown in Fig. 8 (left). The same image following dewarping (right) shows improved linearity across the field of view.
Fig. 12
Fig. 12
Image of a raw low-statistics flood image (left), the high-statistics flood image that was used for the correction (middle), and the resulting corrected low statistics image (right).
Fig. 13
Fig. 13
Nominal Hamamatsu MPPC temperature effects - photopeak position versus temperature.
Fig. 14
Fig. 14
Photopeak channel position drift arising from temperature change due to camera self-heating.
Fig. 15
Fig. 15
Photopeak channel position drift due to temperature changes in normal camera use in the OR during a pilot clinical study.
Fig. 16
Fig. 16
Gamma camera assembled in a Delrin® enclosure with the temperature sensor PCB on top.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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