Benchmark Evaluation of a Hand-Held Beta Camera

Gamma or beta probes have been used for radioimmunoguided surgery and sentinel lymph node localization. Image-enabled small field of view cameras are usually preferred in these scenarios for a fast survey of an area of several or several tens square centimeters. Beta cameras can utilize the natural collimation of beta particles to achieve high sensitivity and spatial resolution as well as a compact size. In this work, we evaluate the basic imaging properties of a hand-held beta camera (2 cm × 2 cm × 1 cm size) in terms of sensitivity, uniformity, spatial resolution and detection between gamma photons and beta particles using a Cu-64 source. The preliminary results demonstrated satisfactory sensitivity, uniformity and millimeter resolution of the camera, particularly as it is close to the source. The camera is also much more sensitive to the beta particles (two orders of magnitude higher) than gamma photons from Cu-64. This study provides a benchmark quantification of the camera and further studies on murine tumor models will be used to further investigate its in vivo applications.