Pixel Detectors

Pixel detectors for precise particle tracking in high energy physics have been developed to a level of maturity during the past decade. Three of the LHC detectors will use vertex detectors close to the interaction point based on the hybrid pixel technology which can be considered the state of the art in this field of instrumentation. A development period of almost 10 years has resulted in pixel detector modules which can stand the extreme rate and timing requirements as well as the very harsh radiation environment at the LHC without severe compromises in performance. From these developments a number of different applications have spun off, most notably for biomedical imaging. Beyond hybrid pixels, a number of monolithic or semi-monolithic developments, which do not require complicated hybridization but come as single sensor/IC entities, have appeared and are currently developed to greater maturity. Most advanced in terms of maturity are so called CMOS active pixels and DEPFET pixels. The present state in the construction of the hybrid pixel detectors for the LHC experiments together with some hybrid pixel detector spin-off is reviewed. In addition, new developments in monolithic or semi-monolithic pixel devices are summarized.Comment: 14 pages, 38 drawings/photographs in 21 figure

Simultaneous in vivo positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging

Positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are widely used in vivo imaging technologies with both clinical and biomedical research applications. The strengths of MRI include high-resolution, high-contrast morphologic imaging of soft tissues; the ability to image physiologic parameters such as diffusion and changes in oxygenation level resulting from neuronal stimulation; and the measurement of metabolites using chemical shift imaging. PET images the distribution of biologically targeted radiotracers with high sensitivity, but images generally lack anatomic context and are of lower spatial resolution. Integration of these technologies permits the acquisition of temporally correlated data showing the distribution of PET radiotracers and MRI contrast agents or MR-detectable metabolites, with registration to the underlying anatomy. An MRI-compatible PET scanner has been built for biomedical research applications that allows data from both modalities to be acquired simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate no effect of the MRI system on the spatial resolution of the PET system and <10% reduction in the fraction of radioactive decay events detected by the PET scanner inside the MRI. The signal-to-noise ratio and uniformity of the MR images, with the exception of one particular pulse sequence, were little affected by the presence of the PET scanner. In vivo simultaneous PET and MRI studies were performed in mice. Proof-of-principle in vivo MR spectroscopy and functional MRI experiments were also demonstrated with the combined scanner

Monte Carlo Simulation for Polychromatic X-ray Fluorescence Computed Tomography with Sheet-Beam Geometry

X-ray fluorescence computed tomography based on sheet-beam can save a huge amount of time to obtain a whole set of projections using synchrotron. However, it is clearly unpractical for most biomedical research laboratories. In this paper, polychromatic X-ray fluorescence computed tomography with sheet-beam geometry is tested by Monte Carlo simulation. First, two phantoms (A and B) filled with PMMA are used to simulate imaging process through GEANT 4. Phantom A contains several GNP-loaded regions with the same size (10 mm) in height and diameter but different Au weight concentration ranging from 0.3% to 1.8%. Phantom B contains twelve GNP-loaded regions with the same Au weight concentration (1.6%) but different diameter ranging from 1mm to 9mm. Second, discretized presentation of imaging model is established to reconstruct more accurate XFCT images. Third, XFCT images of phantom A and B are reconstructed by fliter backprojection (FBP) and maximum likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM) with and without correction, respectively. Contrast to noise ratio (CNR) is calculated to evaluate all the reconstructed images. Our results show that it is feasible for sheet-beam XFCT system based on polychromatic X-ray source and the discretized imaging model can be used to reconstruct more accurate images

Low-resource synchronous coincidence processor for positron emission tomography

We developed a new FPGA-based method for coincidence detection in positronemissiontomography. The method requires low device resources and no specific peripherals in order to resolve coincident digital pulses within a time window of a few nanoseconds. This method has been validated with a low-end Xilinx Spartan-3E and provided coincidence resolutions lower than 6 ns. This resolution depends directly on the signal propagation properties of the target device and the maximum available clock frequency, therefore it is expected to improve considerably on higher-end FPGAs