Design and Implementation of a Portable High-Performance Gamma-Ray Camera.

With the growing number of facilities applying nuclear technology in China, a high-performance portable gamma-ray camera that uses well-developed gamma-ray imaging techniques is increasingly required. To fulfill this requirement, we have designed a camera using a self-supported mask, a CsI(Na) array coupled to a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) rather than the traditional position-sensitive photomultiplier tube (PSPMT) and a highly integrated readout circuit. In addition, with the elimination of multi-Compton events in the crystal array based on a row/column readout circuit incorporated into the data processing method, the peak-to-valley ratio of the flood source map and the image quality quantified by the contrast-to-noise ratio index of 137Cs were improved significantly by 25.8% from 9.8 to 12.3 and 14.8% from 38.7 to 45.0, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]