ABSTRACT
The advent of energy-discriminating photon-counting detectors will result in a further significant increase of sensitivity and higher specificity, while requiring lower dose than current state-of-the-art computed tomography (CT). Exploiting energy information of the impinging photons of the polychromatic emission of the X-ray tube allows distinguishing the two main physical causes of energy-dependent attenuation. The ChromAIX2 already exhibits a large area coverage to facilitate evaluating the Spectral CT image quality, and is 3-side-buttable to support a CT scanner of about 2 cm isocenter coverage. The pixel pitch has been increased from the 300 µm featured in ChromAIX1 to 500 µm. The larger pixels ensure a better energy response as it is less affected by charge sharing. In contrast to the ChromAIX1 device, a baseline restoration circuit has been included in the front-end for dynamic leakage current compensation.
