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Effect of different scintillator choices on the x-ray imaging performance of CMOS sensors

Alikunju, RP; Kearney, S; Moss, R; Khan, A; Stamatis, Y; Bullard, E; Anaxagoras, T; ... Olivo, A; + view all (2023) Effect of different scintillator choices on the x-ray imaging performance of CMOS sensors. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors, and Associated Equipment , 1050 , Article 168136. 10.1016/j.nima.2023.168136. Green open access

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Abstract

The ability of wafer scale Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) imagers to integrate sensing with analogue to digital conversion at the pixel level has led to their widespread appeal in a variety of imaging applications. This has led to significant improvement in speed and reduction in read-out noise in these imagers when compared to charge-coupled devices (CCDs) and amorphous silicon/selenium based flat panel imagers (FPIs). This paper compares the performance characteristics of CMOS X-ray detectors in various configurations by varying certain parameters of a typical X-ray detector such as fibre optic face plate (FOP), scintillator substrate coating, sensor pixel pitch and scintillator thickness. The evaluations were carried out using RQA5 (70 kV) radiation beam quality aimed at general radiography applications. At comparable Air Kerma values, detectors with a fibre optic plate showed an overall better DQE performance at most spatial frequencies, starting slightly lower at low frequencies then overtaking the “no-FOP” case at mid and high frequencies. The analysis of detectors with different substrate coatings for the scintillators showed comparatively higher DQE for the white-coated aluminium substrate scintillator compared to the black-coated one. The DQE comparison of detectors with and pixel pitch resulted in a higher DQE for the pixel pitch one, with the caveat that the scintillator was thick enough as to render differences in pMTF negligible. Finally, the comparison of scintillators with varying thicknesses showed that the thickest scintillator yielded the highest DQE. These characterisation studies helped in understanding the suitability of these different configurations in various general radiography application scenarios and could be of help to prospective users to determine the overall configuration that best fits their specific imaging needs.

Type: Article
Title: Effect of different scintillator choices on the x-ray imaging performance of CMOS sensors
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2023.168136
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2023.168136
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2023 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: CMOS APS; Fibre optic plate (FOP); Air kerma; Scintillator; pMTF; DQE
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Med Phys and Biomedical Eng
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10164808
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