Investigation of scintillator coated CCDs for medical imaging

Abstract

We describe the development of a scintillator-coated charge coupled device (CCD) based camera for imaging small volumes of radionuclide uptake in tissues. The high-resolution gamma imager (HRGI) is a collimated, scintillator-coated, low cost, imager using low noise CCDs. The HRGI operates in photon counting mode using a peltier cooler to achieve an operating temperature of -5 degrees C. We have measured the spatial resolution and efficiency of a prototype CCD from e2v Technologies Ltd coated with a 500-mu m-thick Gadox (Gd2O2S(Tb)) layer using 59.5 keV radiation from a Am-241 source and 140 keV gamma-rays from a Tc-99m source. We also describe our first images using Tc-99m phantoms.