Adaptive Digital X-Ray Detector for High Sensitivity Medical Fluoroscopy Imaging

This work presents a new approach to increase the sensitivity of digital x-ray detectors used for medical fluoroscopy imaging by increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the detected x-ray image signal. The improvement is achieved by recognizing that in some medical imaging scenarios, the object or region of interest that needs to be x-rayed may only cover a fraction of the entire digital x-ray detector imaging array. Our new approach is designed to improve imaging sensitivity by re-configuring the detector array to capture and display only the small localized portion of the array that the health care provider would like imaged, while simultaneously disabling the unused portion of the imaging array. Using transient TFT leakage current measurements, we show how the detector noise level can be lowered as a function of the number of rows disabled.