Detector positioning in a field-deployable limited-angle gamma ray emission tomography system

Abstract

Imaging techniques have been part of the medical and industrial fields for more than a century due to their simple use in the inspection of internal parameters without sample damage. These methods take advantage of the interactions of matter with the medium to present quantitative and qualitative information about a sample, where a sectional scanning technique that performs a rotation of the sample or the detection device is commonly used to capture and register relevant data. This technique is called Tomography, and it uses mathematical algorithms to process and analyze the data that will eventually form or reconstruct the image of the object of interest. Nevertheless, if a sample or detector rotation is not achievable due to dimension limitations or accessibility, a limited-angle tomography technique (sometimes called Laminography) can be performed via scans from a limited angular range. And, the limited captured data will be processed using more sophisticated reconstruction algorithms to compensate for these constraints. Therefore, in this thesis, limited-angle tomography of large samples with a mechanically supported detection device is modeled through mathematical methods and computational simulations in an object-oriented code system, in order to test its positioning capabilities.