Towards a new concept for high sensitivity Compton scatter emission imaging

A new efficient scheme for imaging gamma-ray emitting objects is advocated in this work. A few years back we have put forward the idea of collecting data on Compton scattered rays to reconstruct an object in three dimensions and shown how it works with a collimated detector. To increase drastically the sensitivity of this modality as well as its field of view and resolution we propose now that data acquisition should be performed without collimation. We discuss image formation by scattered radiation in this context by computing and comparing the related Point Spread Functions (PSF) and comment on their properties. We also present numerical simulations to support the attractiveness of this modality.