Detector comparison for high-resolution 3D x-ray diffraction imaging for biospecimen analysis

Abstract

This work evaluates two different detector technologies in terms of their performance in making fast, low-signal diffraction measurements. The first detector is a large-area mammography detector that uses a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) crystal, and the second is a cadmium-telluride photon-counting detector. By measuring the diffraction spectra for a diverse range of materials and with acquisition times ranging from 10 seconds and 0.1 seconds, we show how each detector performs as signal-to-noise ratios decrease and counting statistics become less significant. As a result, we show that the photon counting detector slightly better preserves the long-time average signal in short acquisition times in comparison to the CMOS detector when diffraction signals display sharp/narrow features, but that the detectors performed similarly for materials with much broader diffraction signals, like those associated with soft tissue and biological specimen. This leads us to conclude that the photon-counting detector is slightly higher-performing for our purposes.