XEMIS2: A liquid xenon Compton camera to image small animals

Abstract

An innovative Xenon Medical Imaging System, XEMIS2, designed for small animal 3 $\gamma$ preclinical imaging, has been constructed, and it is currently under test and qualification at the SUBATECH laboratory. It consists of a Compton camera, containing nearly 200 kg of liquid xenon, whose main goals are the precise three-dimensional localization of the 44Sc radioactive emitter used to image the small animal and the reduction of the administered radiopharmaceutical activity in cancer diagnosis. The active volume of the XEMIS2 camera is surrounded by a set of PhotoMultiplier Tubes (PMTs) to measure scintillation light. The read-out anodes are segmented in 20000 pixels to measure ionization charges. In order to reduce the electronics dead-time during continuous data taking, a novel DAQ system specifically designed for XEMIS2 has been realized and recently tested. It consists of two independent synchronized scintillation and ionization signal detection chains. The self-triggered scintillation light detection chain has been recently tested and calibrated in XEMIS1, whose experimental results showed a good performance. XEMIS2 will be soon installed at the Center for Applied Multimodal Imaging (CIMA) in the Nantes University Hospital for further preclinical studies. To safely manage a large amount of xenon in a hospital center, a recovery and storage cryogenic subsystem called ReStoX has been conceived, successfully commissioned, and already installed at CIMA.