An overview of CZT technology
The gamma camera has been a stalwart of nuclear medicine for many years. First described in 1958 by Hal Anger, the gamma camera is still the most used instrument for nuclear medicine imaging studies. While the transition to rotating tomographic SPECT systems and the incorporation of CT for SPECT attenuation correction and localisation has changed the overall system architecture, the design of the gamma camera detector itself has not changed for many years and consists of:
- a collimator that provides directional information to the imaging system by only accepting photons travelling near parallel to the collimator holes;
- a scintillation crystal that converts gamma or x-photons into visible light;
- an array of photomultiplier tubes to convert the light photons from the crystal into electrons and amplify the size of the resulting signal;
- processing electronics to determine the position and energy of detected photons, and to digitise and correct the signals to produce the final image
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