Abstract
Imaging using scintillators is a widespread and cost-effective approach in radiography. While different types of scintillator and sensor configurations exist, it can be stated that the detection efficiency and resolution of a scintillator-based system strongly depend on the scintillator material and its thickness. Recently developed event-driven detectors are capable of registering spots of light emitted by the scintillator after a particle interaction, allowing to reconstruct the Center-of-Mass of the interaction within the scintillator. This results in a more precise location of the event and therefore provides a pathway to overcome the scintillator thickness limitation and increase the effective spatial resolution of the system. Utilizing this principle, we present a detector capable of Time-of-Flight imaging with an adjustable field-of-view, ad-hoc binning and re-binning of data based on the requirements of the experiment including the possibility of particle discrimination via the analysis of the event shape in space and time. It is considered that this novel concept might replace regular cameras in neutron imaging detectors as it provides superior detection capabilities with the most recent results providing an increase by a factor 3 in image resolution and an increase by up to a factor of 7.5 in signal-to-noise for thermal neutron imaging.
Highlights
We have demonstrated that using an event-based imaging system, it is possible to observe single spots of light on a scintillator screen down to the emission of single photons, which allows to discriminate individual particle interactions, resulting in a counting type detector principle
Images are not recorded like photographs by integrating charge deposited on a sensor over time, but by counting single events via the coincidence of photons detected in close proximity in space and time, significantly improving spatial resolution and reducing the noise and background of the imaging system
With the first measurements yielding an improvement in spatial resolution for neutron imaging of more than a factor of 3 and increased S/N by a factor of 7.5, it is assumed that by optimizing the data processing parameters, such as event-size in time and space and the potential of adding an event-shape analysis, the resolution can be increased even further
Summary
Images are not recorded like photographs by integrating charge deposited on a sensor over time, but by counting single events via the coincidence of photons detected in close proximity in space and time, significantly improving spatial resolution and reducing the noise and background of the imaging system. With the first measurements yielding an improvement in spatial resolution for neutron imaging of more than a factor of 3 and increased S/N by a factor of 7.5, it is assumed that by optimizing the data processing parameters, such as event-size in time and space and the potential of adding an event-shape analysis, the resolution can be increased even further.
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