Counting rate performance measurement of newly developed Si/CdTe Compton camera for biological and medical applications

Yamaguchi, Mitsutaka; Kawachi, Naoki; Kamiya, Tomihiro; Suzui, Nobuo; Fujimaki, Shu; Odaka, Hirokazu*; Ishikawa, Shinnosuke*; Kokubun, Motohide*; Watanabe, Shin*; Takahashi, Tadayuki*; Shimada, Hirofumi*; Arakawa, Kazuo*; Suzuki, Yoshiyuki*; Torikai, Kota*; Yoshida, Yukari*; Nakano, Takashi*

In recent developed radionuclide-based imaging technologies utilized for biological and medical studies, wide dynamic range of radiation intensity with a good quantitative linearity is one of the most important factors. However, the linearity of a detector or a sensor generally breaks due to the dead-time increasing in high counting rate. Therefore, in case of an imaging camera, which is a large set of detectors, it is essential to measure the sensitivity profile of it varying with the radiation source intensity for correction of nonlinearity of each detector. Si/CdTe Compton camera is comprised of two layered double-sided Si strip detectors and two layered double-sided CdTe strip detectors with a four-layer laminated structure. For imaging, the source positions of -rays are identified by analysing the deposited energies and the scattering angles from counted events in those of detectors. In this work, the Compton camera that was newly developed for biological and medical applications was investigated on the counting rate performance, and the sensitivity profile of this highly complicated imaging system was measured using a F point -ray source. The intense source of 20 MBq was used to measure the sensitivity profiles for a wide range of counting rate in a short period. The result was compared with a calculation using a model considering the dead time of the detection system.