Experimental evaluation of the pile-up trigger method in a revised quantum-counting CT detector

Abstract

The application of quantum-counting detectors in clinical Computed Tomography (CT) is challenged by very large Xray photon fluxes present in modern systems. Situations with sub-optimal patient positioning or scanning of small objects can cause unattenuated exposure of parts of the detector. The typical pulse durations in CdTe/CdZnTe sensor range in the order of several nanoseconds, even if the detector design is optimized for high-rate applications by using high sensor depletion voltages and small pixel sizes. This can lead to severe pile-up of the pulses, resulting in count efficiency degradation or even ambiguous detector signals. The recently introduced pile-up trigger method solves this problem by combining the signal of a photon counting channel with a signal indicative of the level of pile-up. Latter is obtained with a photon-counting channel operated at threshold energies beyond the maximum energy of the incident photon spectrum so that its signal arises purely from pulse pile-up. We present an experimental evaluation of the pile-up trigger method in a revised quantum-counting CT detector and compare our results to simulations of the method with idealized detector properties.