Orateur
Description
Gamma-ray imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) have been utilized in nuclear medicine for diagnosis. The radioactive tracer imaging can provide functional or metabolic information non-invasively at the molecule or cellular level. However, nuclear medicine imaging techniques cannot extract the local molecule or cellular environment information. While single photon emission radionuclides are conventionally used for SPECT, some of them emits two or more cascade photons with a short duration of intermediate state; for example, In-111 emits 171 keV and 245 keV gamma-rays with 84.5 ns time constant. An angular correlation between cascade photons that originates from the nuclear spin state is perturbed by the external fields. We have proposed a novel simultaneous gamma-ray imaging and local environment sensing method via the angular correlation measurement, which provides radionuclide position and its local environmental information simultaneously. In this study, we demonstrated simultaneous measurements of angular correlation and gamma-ray imaging using 8 x 8 array high-resolution Gd3(Ga,Al)5O12(Ce) scintillator detectors coupled with silicon photo multipliers (Hamamatsu, S13361-3050). We succeeded to obtain the local pH information of In-111 solution and the accumulation image simultaneously. We will report the detail in our presentation.
