A novel inverse problem in γ-rays emission imaging

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