Project Details
Projekt
Development of a Compton camera for biological and medical imaging
Subject Area
Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 529668432
Many functional studies in medicine and biology rely on the use of radioactive tracers. To image the temporal distribution of such tracers most often gamma- or beta-plus-emitters are used. Physical limits of the detection mechanisms restrict the use to isotopes with gamma energies well below 1 MeV. The detector proposed here, a type of Compton camera, is able to detect gammas above 1 MeV. This enables a whole new range of isotopes to be used and opens up new fields of study in medicine and biology. In this project a complete imaging system will be developed, constructed and commissioned. The system consists of a Compton camera that uses the Cherenkov light of the electron from the Compton scattering process in a transparent radiator to reconstruct the kinematic properties of the electron. The scattered gamma is detected using scintillators. Both components use SiPMs for the light collection. They are connected to ASICs which perform a charge integration and provide a time stamp with a 200 ps resolution. The signals from the ASICs are then processed in real time on FPGAs. These sort the signals according to their production time and perform a data reduction by keeping only the data that is needed for the image reconstruction. The project will result in hardware models and algorithms combining high accuracy at low latency for real-time event detection. It is planned to develop pipelined parallelized readout analysis hardware algorithms along with compact readout data structures supporting scalability. The integration of multiple readout chips with temporal offsets will also be supported. A neural network will be trained on the data from known radioactive sources taken with this detector prototype in order to reconstruct the position of the radioactive source. The detector will allow real time imaging and enable new research possibilities both in biology and medicine.
DFG Programme
New Instrumentation for Research
