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The 250 µm pitch 80x80 pixel HEXITEC detector systems have shown that spectroscopic imaging with an energy resolution of < 1 keV FWHM per pixel can be readily achieved in the range of 5-200 keV with Al-pixel CdTe biased to −500 V. This level of spectroscopic imaging has a variety of applications but the ability to produce large area detectors remains a barrier to the adoption of this technology. The limited size of ASICs and defect free CdTe wafers dictates that building large area monolithic detectors is not presently a viable option. A 3-side buttable detector module has been developed to cover large areas with arrays of smaller detectors. The detector modules are 20.35 × 20.45 mm with CdTe bump bonded to the HEXITEC ASIC with coverage up to the edge of the module on three sides. The fourth side has a space of 3 mm to allow I/O wire bonds to be made between the ASIC and the edge of a PCB that routes the signals to a connector underneath the active area of the module. The detector modules have been assembled in rows of five modules with a dead space of 170 µm between each module. Five rows of modules have been assembled in a staggered height array where the wire bonds of one row of modules are covered by the active detector area of a neighboring row. A data acquisition system has been developed to digitise, store and output the 24 Gbit/s data that is generated by the array. The maximum bias magnitude that could be applied to the CdTe detectors from the common voltage source was limited by the worst performing detector module. In this array of detectors a bias of −400 V was used and the detector modules had 93 % of pixels with better than 1.2 keV FWHM at 59.5 keV. An example of K-edge enhanced imaging for mammography was demonstrated. Subtracting images from the events directly above and below the K-edge of the Iodine contrast agent was able to extract the Iodine information from the image of a breast phantom and improve the contrast of the images. This

Semi-insulating wafers of GaAs material with a thickness of 500 µm have been compensated with chromium by Tomsk State University. Initial measurements have shown the material to have high resistivity (3 × 10 9 Ω cm) and tests with pixel detectors on a 250 µm pitch produced uniform spectroscopic performance across an 80 × 80 pixel array. At present, there is a lack of detectors that are capable of operating at high X-ray fluxes (> 10 8 photons s −1 mm −2 ) in the energy range 5-50 keV. Under these conditions, the poor stopping power of silicon, as well as issues with radiation hardness, severely degrade the performance of traditional detectors. While high-Z materials such as CdTe and CdZnTe may have much greater stopping power, the formation of space charge within these detectors degrades detector performance. Initial measurements made with GaAs:Cr detectors suggest that many of its material properties make it suitable for these challenging conditions. In this paper the radiation hardness of the GaAs:Cr material has been measured on the B16 beam line at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron. Small pixel detectors were bonded to the STFC Hexitec ASIC and were irradiated with 3 × 10 8 photons s −1 mm −2 monochromatic 12 keV X-rays up to a maximum dose of 0.6 MGy. Measurements of the spectroscopic performance before and after irradiation have been used to assess the extent of the radiation damage.

In the last decade, the Detector Development Group at the Technology Department of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), U.K., established a variety of fabrication and bonding techniques to build pixelated X-ray and γ-ray detector systems such as the spectroscopic X-ray imaging detector HEXITEC [1]. The fabrication and bonding of such devices comprises a range of processes including material surface preparation, photolithography, stencil printing, flip-chip and wire bonding of detectors to application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). This paper presents interconnect and bonding techniques used in the fabrication chain for pixelated detectors assembled at STFC. For this purpose, detector dies (∼ 20 × 20 mm 2 ) of high quality, single crystal semiconductors, such as cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) are cut to the required thickness (up to 5mm). The die surfaces are lapped and polished to a mirror-finish and then individually processed by electroless gold deposition combined with photolithography to form 74×74 arrays of 200 µm × 200 µm pixels with 250 µm pitch. Owing to a lack of availability of CZT wafers, lithography is commonly carried out on individual detector dies which represents a significant technical challenge as the edge of the pixel array and the surrounding guard band lies close to the physical edge of the crystal. Further, such detector dies are flip-chip bonded to readout ASIC using lowtemperature curing silver-loaded epoxy so that the stress between the bonded detector die and the ASIC is minimized. In addition, this reduces crystalline modifications of the detector die that occur at temperature greater than 150 ˚C and have adverse effects on the detector performance. To allow smaller pitch detectors to be bonded, STFC has also developed a compression cold-weld indium bump bonding technique utilising bumps formed by a photolithographic lift-off technique.

A crucial method for investigating patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) is the calculation of the left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). It is, consequently, imperative to precisely estimate the value of LVEF-a process that can be done with myocardial perfusion scintigraphy. Therefore, the present study aimed to establish and compare the estimation performance of the quantitative parameters of the reconstruction methods filtered backprojection (FBP) and ordered-subset expectation maximization (OSEM). Methods: A beating-heart phantom with known values of end-diastolic volume, end-systolic volume, and LVEF was used. Quantitative gated SPECT/quantitative perfusion SPECT software was used to obtain these quantitative parameters in a semiautomatic mode. The Butterworth filter was used in FBP, with the cutoff frequencies between 0.2 and 0.8 cycles per pixel combined with the orders of 5, 10, 15, and 20. Sixty-three reconstructions were performed using 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 16 OSEM subsets, combined with several iterations: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 32, and 64. Results: With FBP, the values of end-diastolic, end-systolic, and the stroke volumes rise as the cutoff frequency increases, whereas the value of LVEF diminishes. This same pattern is verified with the OSEM reconstruction. However, with OSEM there is a more precise estimation of the quantitative parameters, especially with the combinations 2 iterations · 10 subsets and 2 iterations · 12 subsets. Conclusion: The OSEM reconstruction presents better estimations of the quantitative parameters than does FBP. This study recommends the use of 2 iterations with 10 or 12 subsets for OSEM and a cutoff frequency of 0.5 cycles per pixel with the orders 5, 10, or 15 for FBP as the best estimations for the left ventricular volumes and ejection fraction quantification in myocardial perfusion scintigraphy.

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A multi-technique characterization of electroless gold contacts on single crystal CdZnTe radiation detectors S J Bell, M A Baker, H Chen et al. -Performance comparison of small-pixel CdZnTe radiation detectors with gold contacts formed by sputter and electroless deposition