This article presents a recent result on the feasibility of reconstruction of the radioactivity distribution of an object from a sequence of Compton-scattered radiation data in emission imaging. This may be regarded as a novel inverse principle as opposed to the traditional one in which the object is reconstructed only from the non-scattered rays collected at different incident directions. The new inversion procedure is described by an invertible linear integral transform which may be viewed as a generalized Radon transform and has several advantages over the old one. It improves significantly the contrast of the reconstructed image. The required data for reconstruction is easily acquired from an energy and position sensitive gamma camera under the form of scattered distribution images classified by their Compton-scattering angle. The motion of the camera in standard tomographic procedure is here no longer necessary for data taking.
Transmission scanning-based estimation of the attenuation map plays a crucial role in quantitative radionuclide imaging. X-ray computed tomography (CT) reconstructs directly the attenuation coefficients map from data transmitted through the object. This paper proposes an alternative route for reconstructing the object attenuation map by exploiting Compton scatter of transmitted radiation from an externally placed radionuclide source. In contrast to conventional procedures, data acquisition is realized as a series of images parameterized by the Compton scattering angle and registered on a stationary gamma camera operating without spatial displacement. Numerical simulation results using realistic voxel-based phantoms are presented to illustrate the efficiency of this new transmission scanning approach for attenuation map reconstruction. The encouraging results presented in this paper may suggest the possibility of proposing a new concept for emission/transmission imaging using scattered radiation, which has many advantages compared to conventional technologies.
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