Forschungs-Neutronenquelle Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, 85748, Garching, Germany.
Paul Scherrer Institute, 5232, Villigen, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2021 Nov 1;11(1):21360. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-00822-5.
Imaging using scintillators is a widespread and cost-effective approach in radiography. While different types of scintillator and sensor configurations exist, it can be stated that the detection efficiency and resolution of a scintillator-based system strongly depend on the scintillator material and its thickness. Recently developed event-driven detectors are capable of registering spots of light emitted by the scintillator after a particle interaction, allowing to reconstruct the Center-of-Mass of the interaction within the scintillator. This results in a more precise location of the event and therefore provides a pathway to overcome the scintillator thickness limitation and increase the effective spatial resolution of the system. Utilizing this principle, we present a detector capable of Time-of-Flight imaging with an adjustable field-of-view, ad-hoc binning and re-binning of data based on the requirements of the experiment including the possibility of particle discrimination via the analysis of the event shape in space and time. It is considered that this novel concept might replace regular cameras in neutron imaging detectors as it provides superior detection capabilities with the most recent results providing an increase by a factor 3 in image resolution and an increase by up to a factor of 7.5 in signal-to-noise for thermal neutron imaging.
闪烁体成像是放射学中广泛应用且具有成本效益的方法。虽然存在不同类型的闪烁体和传感器配置，但可以说基于闪烁体的系统的检测效率和分辨率强烈依赖于闪烁体材料及其厚度。最近开发的事件驱动探测器能够记录粒子相互作用后闪烁体发出的光点，从而能够在闪烁体内部重建相互作用的质心。这导致事件位置更精确，因此提供了克服闪烁体厚度限制并提高系统有效空间分辨率的途径。利用这一原理，我们提出了一种探测器，能够进行飞行时间成像，具有可调节的视场，根据实验要求进行特定的和重新的数据分析分组，包括通过分析事件在空间和时间上的形状进行粒子甄别。可以认为，这个新的概念可能会取代中子成像探测器中的常规相机，因为它提供了卓越的检测能力，最新的结果提供了图像分辨率提高 3 倍，热中子成像的信噪比提高了高达 7.5 倍。
