Development of Energy-Integrating Detectors for Large-Area X-Ray Imaging

Abstract

Digital radiography in medicine requires large-area imaging capabilities. This chapter reviews the development of flat-panel detectors (FPDs) based on amorphous materials, which are appropriate for the large-area manufacturing of electronic devices. The configuration of an FPD comprises two components, namely, an x-ray converter and a readout pixel array. A few important design parameters and their developments are described in this chapter. Advanced development concepts of the detector are anticipated and some are introduced. Furthermore, a cascaded linear-systems method is reviewed as it is a very powerful tool for the improved design and assessment of x-ray imaging detector systems. Demonstration of a simple cascaded-systems analysis to investigate the influence of detector design parameters on performance is presented. While amorphous material-based FPDs have successfully cleared the hurdle of large-area imaging problems, their energy-integration-based operation limits the extraction of spectral information of the incoming x-ray beam. Some efforts toward energy-discriminated imaging are briefly reviewed, noting that photon-counting detectors will revolutionize detector development. The entire development story of energy-integrating detectors for large-area x-ray imaging is outside the scope of this chapter; the rest of the story not covered here is replaced by references.