Coded Aperture Tomography Revisited

If the goal of Nuclear Medicine is to quantify the distribution of a radio labelled pharmaceutical inside an organ, then the two major drawbacks of the gamma camera when used with parallel hole collimators (the most commonly used imaging device in Nuclear Medicine) are low sensitivity and poor depth resolution of imbedded sources. The former leads to low statistics (and therefore noisy) images. Improved depth resolution can be achieved by rotating the camera around the patient (1) (SPECT system) for imaging stationary distributions.