Portable gamma camera for clinical use in nuclear medicine

Up today Hamamatsu R3292 is the Position Sensitive Photo Multiplier Tube (PSPMT) with the largest sensitive area (10 cm of diameter). At the same time it has the minimum size for clinical application in Nuclear Medicine. A portable gamma camera was realized, based on 5" PSPMT coupled to a scintillating array. The head has a light weight (15 kg.) spatial resolution resulted better than that of Anger Camera with good linearity response, good energy resolution and FOV coincident with intrinsic one of PSPMT. To optimize gamma camera response two different scintillating arrays were tested: YAP:Ce and CsI (Tl). Their overall size cover all photocathode active area, and crystal pixel size was 2 mm×2 mm. The detection efficiency resulted comparable to that of Anger Camera. The best result was obtained by CsI (Tl) scintillating: an intrinsic spatial resolution of 1.6 mm FWHM and a relative energy resolution of 17% FWHM. With a standard general purpose collimator a spatial resolution of about 2 mm resulted. Some preliminary results were also obtained in breast scintigraphy