Performance of Optimized Amorphous Silicon, Cesium-Iodide based Large Field-of-View Detector for Mammography

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to provide a performance characterization of a new large field-of-view (LFOV) flat panel detector with a novel pixel design that has been optimized for both screening mammography and low dose advanced applications such as tomosynthesis. The measurements reported here were performed on prototype x-ray imagers for GE's upcoming LFOV mammography system. In addition to a light sensitive photodiode and a field effect transistor (FET), a storage capacitor has been added to each pixel in order to increase the dynamic range. In order to characterize the performance of the detector, measurements of the MTF, noise power spectrum, DQE, electronic noise, conversion factor, and lag were made. The results show that the new detector can deliver a DQE at 0 and 5 lp/mm of 72% and 28% while maintaining an MTF at 5 lp/mm of 30%. The addition of a storage capacitor at each pixel allows the conversion factor to be increased to reduce the noise floor - leading to a 400% extension of the dynamic range. Finally, a re-design of the FET and photodiode to reduce the time constants allows a 10X reduction in the lag that enables up to 4 frame per second imaging with less than 1% lag. This work represents the first results from a next generation large field of view a-Si/CsI based x-ray imager for mammography and shows that a single detector can achieve high performance standards for both high dose screening and low dose, fast acquisition tomosynthesis simultaneously.