An imaging device for visualizing a radioactive tracer in a human or animal body (6) comprises: a collimator plate (11) having a plurality of pinholes (111); a radiation detector (2) being arranged adjacent to a detector surface (112) of the collimator plate (11) such that radioactive radiation passing at least one of the plurality of pinholes (111) is received by the radiation detector (2); and an image processing unit (3) adapted to evaluate radiation signals obtained by the radiation detector (2) to determine a three dimensional position of at least one radiation source (61) emitting the radioactive radiation and causing the radiation signals.

A method for determining an abnormality score map for Single-photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) gamma camera flood analysis includes extracting a plurality of image patches from an input flood image and generating a feature vector for each image patch. A per-patch abnormality score is generated for each feature vector by comparing the feature vector against a normal flood feature dictionary comprising one or more normal flood feature vectors generated using a plurality of normal flood images. Then, an abnormality score map may be generated to depict the per-patch abnormality scores for the input flood image.

An SiPM sensor chip includes pixels consisting of microcells Z, each pixel being associated with an xy position x1, x2, x3, . . . , xN or y1, y2, y3, . . . yM. A plurality of pixels form a block, and the microcells are connected to output channels for a linear coding.

The present invention provides a method of calibrating gamma-ray and photon counting detectors, including, but not limited to, monolithic crystal detectors. The method of the present invention is based on the observation that measurement of fan beam datasets allows the synthesis of collimated beam data to derive MDRFs by use of an algorithm that finds the common or intersecting data subsets of two or more orthogonal calibration datasets. This makes the calibration process very efficient while still allowing the full benefits of maximum-likelihood event-parameter estimation that incorporates the statistical nature of the light sensor measurements.

An online real-time correction method and system for a positron emission tomography (PET) detector. The method includes: acquiring a drifted channel number of a peak position of a full-energy peak in a drifted energy spectrum after a gain value of a PET detector system has changed and a ratio of a currently accumulated energy of each signal channel to a current total accumulated energy of all signal channels; substituting the above parameters, an initial channel number of the peak position of the full-energy peak in an initial energy spectrum and a ratio of an initially accumulated energy of each signal channel to a total initially accumulated energy of all of the signal channels in the PET detector system into a gain adjustment ratio calculation formula to calculate a gain adjustment ratio; and adjusting, according to the gain adjustment ratio, a gain value of the PET detector system.

An instrument and software methodology to detect a radioactive source and incorporates the following: 1) two radiation detectors in a co-axial configuration, housed in a handheld probe, and 2) a gamma detection control unit executing software algorithms to limit the functional field of view to the front aspect of the probe, vary the depth and width of the field of view to provide collimation without the use of metallic shielding, and allowing the instrument to measure the distance to the radiation source.

A detector of a gamma camera is configured such that a radioactive point source is positioned within a field of view at a fixed distance from the detector. A predetermined number of gamma photons emitted by the point source and passed through a collimator are acquired. A system-specific planar sensitivity is computed for a combination of the collimator and detector using the number of gamma photons acquired, a time duration of the acquisition, and precalibrated radioactivity data of the point source corrected for decay that occurred after a precalibration time. A deviation of the computed system-specific planar sensitivity from a class standard sensitivity value for a combination of the radioactive point source, the collimator, and the detector is computed. A class standard sensitivity value for a combination of a radiopharmaceutical, the collimator, and the detector is scaled by the computed deviation, yielding a scaled system-specific sensitivity value for the radiopharmaceutical.

A radiation detection device (300) is used in a nuclear medicine diagnosis apparatus, and includes a plurality of scintillators (44), a semiconductor light-receiving device (SiPM), a position detection circuit (214), and a timing detection circuit (216). Each of the scintillators converts a gamma ray emitted from a subject (15) into fluorescence. The semiconductor light-receiving device is provided corresponding to each of the scintillators and converts the fluorescence converted by a corresponding one of the scintillators into an electrical signal. The position detection circuit specifies a gamma ray detection position in the scintillators based on the electrical signal from the semiconductor light-receiving device. The timing detection circuit is connected to an anode of the semiconductor light-receiving device, and specifies time information corresponding to a time of occurrence of an event in which the gamma ray is detected.

A method and apparatus are provided for positron emission imaging to calibrate energy measurements of a pixilated gamma-ray detector using energy sharing events between channels of the detector. Due to conservation of energy, when the energy of a single gamma ray shared among multiple channels, the sum of measured energies across the respective channel must equal the original energy of the incident gamma ray. Further, the fractions of the original energy distributed to the respective channels can span the entire range of zero to the original energy. Thus, a single gamma-ray source (e.g., cesium isotope 137) can be used to continuously calibrate the nonlinear energy response of the detector over an entire range of interest.

Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is performed with multiple emission energies. For quantitative or qualitative SPECT, the image formation process for emissions at different energy ranges is modeled (44, 46, 48, 50) separately. Different scatter, different attenuation, and/or different collimator-detector response models corresponding to different energy ranges are used in the reconstruction.