Performance of a Lanthanum Bromide Detector and a New Conception Collimator for Radiopharmaceuticals Molecular Imaging in Oncology

We have realized and tested a new-design compact gamma camera for high resolution SPET (Single Photon Emission Tomography), and small animals' radio-pharmaceutical molecular imaging. The camera is based on a "continuous" Lanthanum tri-Bromide crystal, and a new Low Energy (LE) collimator. The crystal is interfaced to a 2×2 array of Hamamatsu-H8500 position sensitive photo-multipliers. The lead collimator features parallel hexagonal 1.0 mm holes, 18 mm length, 0.2 mm septa and 10×10 cm² detection area. It was newly designed to fully exploit the high spatial resolution a Lanthanum crystal may provide. To better evaluate its role, we have compared our camera to three other systems with similar crystals and photomultipliers, but employing traditional collimators, either pinhole or parallel. The new camera seems to be complementary to pinhole systems and shows a very attractive trade-off between spatial resolution and detection area.