Dual energy imaging in mammography: Cross-talk study in a Si array detector

One of the main limitation to the extensive use of breast-cancer screening as a prevention method is the relatively high X-ray dose released to the patient. A new approach is under study in which two quasi-monochromatic beams with mean energies of 18.0 and 36.0 keV - are produced simultaneously, starting from an X-ray tube, by means of a monochromator based on a pyrolytic graphite crystal. The two beams are superimposed in space. The removal of the energy components with low content of diagnostic information from the spectrum, leads to a reduction of the dose released to patients maintaining (or improving) the image quality. The two quasi-monochromatic beams impinge on the patient and then are detected with a solid-state array detector; the image results as the difference between the transmitted intensities of the two detected beams. In this work, the performances of two different electronic readouts and three pixel widths of a silicon position sensitive array detector are simulated and described in order to minimize cross-talk effects between adjacent pixels. The use of a detector with spectrometric capabilities is necessary to separate, by means of thresholds, the high energy photons from the low energy ones.