Improvement in the energy resolving capabilities of photon counting detectors

Abstract

Patterned pixel array was proposed to increase the number of energy bins in a single pixel of photon counting detectors without adding more comparators and counters. The pixels were grouped into four different types and each pixel has a common threshold and a specific threshold assigned to each pixel type. The common threshold in every pixel records the total number of incident photons regardless of its pixel type and the specific thresholds classify incident photon energies. The patterned pixel array was evaluated with the pinhole gamma camera system based on the XRI-UNO detector flip-chip bonded with a 1mm thick CdTe sensor. The experimental data was acquired with time-over-threshold mode to avoid the charge sharing problem. The shared total charges created by one photon can be found by summing all pixels within the cluster. To correct the different response to the same energy of photon, the energy calibration of the time-over-threshold value was perfomed independently depending on the cluster size. The time-over-threshold values were separated into two energy bins since we assumed that each pixel has two thresholds. Although each pixel has only two thresholds, five images from different energy windows were obtained by sharing the spectal information from four adjacent pixels. Thus, degradation of the spatial resolution in the image occured in each energy window. The image of the entire energy, however, was not degraded since all four different types of pixels have a common threshold just above the noise level. In addition, the number of steps for the threshold scan method can be drastically reduced with the increased number of effective thresholds in a single pixel.