Real-Time Requirements and Transferability in Compton Imaging: From the Detector Chain to the Application

Abstract

Compton cameras are proposed for tasks whose value decays with delay: verifying a range during irradiation, guiding an intervention, characterising an inaccessible volume, surveying a band no telescope covers. Whether a device can serve such a task is settled by the composition of its whole chain, while the literature that would answer the question is organised by stage -- so claims made at application level routinely rest on evidence obtained at component level. This review walks that chain, asking at each stage what binds first and what a reader can determine from the published text, and then asks what governs whether a capability transfers between groups and between application domains. The evidence is of two kinds: 83 full texts scored in context against defined markers, and, for five application domains measured alike, the size of the receiving literature, of the need it states, of the incumbent and of deployment commitment. Performance is reported at one operating point in 65 of 83 full texts, with count rate swept in none: the field reports values where transfer requires gradients. An accelerator is used in 39 works and a learned model in 31, while separability is discussed in 28, a memory footprint given in 9, and the cost of a precomputation or the inference time of a model in none. Across domains, neither the size of the receiving literature, nor of the incumbent, nor of the stated need orders the domains as deployment commitment does, while whether the incumbent can serve the task at all, and how many domain boundaries the output must cross, do so consistently. The distribution of publication is close to the inverse of the distribution of deployment commitment. We give the quantities a report must contain for a third party to judge whether a method fits an application it was not built for.