Improved determination of the position and activity of a radioactive point source inside a bulky medium using several detectors : The special case of a lung counter : A general view

A method is described to locate a radioactive point source in a lung using a commercial array of lung detectors. The method takes advantage of the fact that modern commercial systems consist of several Ge detectors, each connected to a multi-channel analyzer, and the information from each detector can be analyzed separately. The system is calibrated with point sources placed in various locations in the lungs of a phantom. A vector method is presented for determining which of the calibration locations in the phantom is closest to the location of the unknown point source. It has been shown that the accuracy of the method increases with increasing number of the vector dimensions. A higher dimensionality can be achieved by analyzing counts of several gamma lines or by using more detectors.