Recent advances in photodetectors for medical applications.
A decade of single-photon SPAD imagers in the biomedical sciences
After the successful fabrication of the first single-photon avalanche diode, or SPAD, in a standard CMOS technology (2003), a large variety of single- photon cameras and architectures have been deployed and explored on a host of biophotonics applications. Single-photon diodes provide the capability of measuring single-photon events with picosecond accuracy, thus enabling massively parallel time-resolved and/or photon counting imaging arrays. The developed architectures range from simple pixel arrays, with the majority of the electronics off-chip, all the way to fully integrated `smart’ chips with column- level or in-pixel timing and data pre-processing. Additional processing does often take place on companion FPGA boards, enabling real-time features such as lifetime determination, autocorrelation, and data compression.
The large variety of biomedical applications demonstrate the usability of single-photon cameras in ever growing research fields, such as (endoscopic) fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM), (multi-beam multiphoton) FLIM-FRET, (single plane illumination microscopy) fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), time-resolved Raman, (NIR) optical tomography, super-resolution microscopy, and positron emission tomography (PET), to name a few. We will highlight the main sensor architectures and the related applications, and provide a view into the future of single-photon imaging in the biomedical sciences.
Status and perspectives of the gaseous photon detectors technologies
The evolution and the present status of the gaseous photon detectors technologies are reviewed.
The most recent developments in several branches of the field are described and the performance of operating and newly installed gaseous photon detector systems are discussed.
The promising advancement in cryogenic and other applications of gaseous photon detector related techniques are presented and the quest for visible light gaseous photon detectors is discussed.
Detection limits of front-end IC architectures for hybrid imaging X-ray detectors
An ideal readout circuit would detect X-ray beam with full spectral information and Fano-limited precision and would deal with high count rates, limited only by charge transport within the detector. Unfortunately, in a real readout IC in particular the performance in speed and noise are conflicting requirements. In this review, the speed – noise trade-off is discussed, referring to the recent ICs for hybrid detectors: those with best results in the energy resolution and those with the highest counting rates. ICs demonstrating the best performance from each end and also intermediate solutions are analyzed.
Muon tomography, from high energy Physics to societal applications
High energy Physics detectors are constantly developing in order to improve the knowledge in its science but this instrumentation is hardly use to answer to other matter, in particular for applications in society. Through an historical view of the effort done on the industrialization parallel to the R&D made on our detectors for particle and cosmic ray detection, we will show how we were able to participate to the ScanPyramid mission. Our contribution was to build three muographic telescopes which was deployed at the Great Pyramid Khufu in Egypt in the purpose of finding new cavities. This technology is now interessing many manufacturers for other societal applications.
