Wafer-scale pixelated scintillator and specially designed data acquisition system for fiber optic taper array-coupled digital x-ray detector

A digital x-ray detector scheme based on a pixelated scintillator coupled with a fiber optic (FOT) array is suitable for many high-resolution x-ray imaging applications. However, certain challenges need to be addressed for fabrication of wafer-scale uniform pixelated x-ray scintillators. In addition, difficulties associated with implementation of the data acquisition system for acquiring output image data from the multiple image sensors used in the detector also need to be addressed. In this paper, a 2×2 FOT array-coupled digital x-ray detector scheme using a 5-in. pixelated scintillator is proposed. A novel fabrication setup along with the corresponding processes for fabricating the wafer-scale pixelated scintillator and implementation of a specially designed embedded data acquisition system based on a single embedded micro-processer (ARM) and four field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips are discussed in detail. Preliminary experiments demonstrate that this pixelated scintillator-based digital x-ray detector scheme with an active imaging area of about 100 mm×100 mm shows considerable potential for use in high-resolution x-ray imaging.