Group Leader: Mokhtar Chmeissani
Keywords: Radiography, nuclear medicine, Pixel ASIC
Description: The instrumentation group in IFAE is involved in 3 projects, each patent protected, related to the development of X-ray pixel detector in the field of X-ray radiology for medical imaging, X-ray radiology for quality control, and Nuclear Medicine (Positron Emission Tomography).
The medical imaging project will develop an X-ray camera for guiding the breast biopsy needle in real time. IFAE is involved in developing 6cm x 6cm X-ray camera with pixel pitch of 100um using CdTe pixel detector. This include, the firmware, Graphic user interface.
The X-ray quality control project will develop state of the art X-ray line pixel camera, for security scanner machine, which can differentiate between different types of liquids based on the measured densities. It can be used as well for food quality control, such as detecting the relevant quantity of fat and bone particles in the sausage, as an example. IFAE has developed its own photon-counting pixel ASIC with pixel pitch of 330um coupled to pixel CdTe detector. Each pixel has 6 energy levels and therefore the image produced will provide excellent density map of the object with relatively good spatial resolution.
Voxel Imaging PET (VIP) is a novel nuclear medicine diagnostic device. It was funded by FP7-ERC Advanced Grant. It is small PET with 72000 channels. Its voxel size is 1mm x 1mm x 2mm. Its intrinsic spatial resolution in X and Y is 300um, and in Z is 600um. It provides excellent spatial resolution. The FWHM energy resolution = 2.2% at 511 keV. Simulation results shows that with such high resolution PET, one can detect breast cancer with a size as small as 2mm in diameter.
IFAE wants to consolidate it research on this frontier and it is seeking outstanding Ph.D students to get involved in one of more of the aforementioned research projects, that can provide unique opportunity to develop know-how and experience in packaging pixel semiconductor detector to the pixel ASIC; Development of the Graphic User Interface (GUI) to read/read to pixel detector and other auxiliary devices; Customized and tailored software for a dedicated Image reconstruction to match the detector specification; Development of the FPGA firmware to provide the basic commands for the GUI to read/write to/from the pixel sensor; Prototyping (design/production/testing) pixel ASIC; Detector Physics Simulation, and data analysis.
