Investigation of scintillator coated CCDs for medical imaging

We describe the development of a scintillator-coated charge coupled device (CCD) based camera for imaging small volumes of radionuclide uptake in tissues. The high resolution gamma imager (HRGI) is a collimated, scintillator-coated, low cost, high performance imager using low noise CCDs. The HRGI operates in photon counting mode using a peltier cooler to achieve an operating temperature of 0°C. We have measured the spatial resolution and efficiency of a prototype CCD from e2v Technologies Ltd coated with a 500μm thick Gadox (Gd2O2S(Tb)) layer using 59.5 keV radiation from a ²⁴¹Am source and 140 keV gamma-rays from a ^99mTc source. We also describe our first images using ^99mTc phantoms.