A Simulation Study on Spatial Resolution and Noise Power Spectra of a URA-based Multi-hole Collimator in a Small Gamma Camera

Abstract

Presently the gamma scintillation camera is widely used in various industrial, environmental and medical diagnostic fields. Two major performance parameters, spatial resolution and noise, are primarily determined by the collimator. The imaging performance of the simple collimator, single pin-hole, and a coded-aperture collimator, uniformly redundant array (URA), are analyzed in this study. Though parallel-hole collimators are used in some medical applications, in principle its performance is equivalent to that of a single-hole collimator and moreover its use is limited to the near-field application only. A coded aperture imaging (CAI) techniques have been proposed for gamma-ray imaging especially for far-field applications such as the astrophysics study or environmental monitoring in order to overcome these limitations of a pin-hole or a parallel-hole collimator. In this study, the simulated gamma images using a monte carlo code, MCNP, were acquired with two different energy windows and two-type and four-different collimators. For the evaluation of spatial resolution and noise power spectra, modulation transfer function (MTF) and normalized noise power spectra (NNPS) were computed for all images. In the result, we found that MTF and NNPS can reflect the different properties of different gamma camera systems.