SBIR/STTR Award attributes
X-ray detection and imaging are broadly applied for non-invasive medical diagnostics, security, industry material inspection and scientific research. X-ray passes through the human body forming an image revealing tissues or organs inside of the human body due to their different X-ray attenuation abilities. To achieve fast and safe X-ray diagnostics, a low-cost, sensitive X-ray imager is highly demanded to monitor the advance of the disease in patients. Digital X-ray detectors and Computerized tomography have replaced traditional film-based X-ray imaging for multiple reasons, while the X-ray dose required for imaging actually increases in the computerized tomography. Computerized tomography has been broadly applied for cancer screening, however, exposure to ionizing radiation is known to increase the risk of cancer due to the damaging of DNA by X-ray. The mainstream products in market are an indirect type with a combination of scintillators with photodetector arrays, which are expensive, bulky, heavy, and not sensitive. The only direct-type detectors are based on amorphous selenium, which have very good sharpness in imaging quality, but is not very stable and least sensitive. Many current/past research only lead to incremental improvement of sensitivity in the past decade which is too slow to solve this urgent problem. This project is revolutionizing a high-sensitive and flexible metal halide perovskite materials filled membranes for X-ray direct detection technology at low exposure dose irradiation. This perovskite materials have at least 1000 times higher detection sensitivity than amorphous selenium direct detectors and much higher resolution images than indirect detectors based on a commercial cesium iodide scintillator integrated with weak light sensor arrays. This project will develop a prototype line X-ray detector which can be used for material characterization with enhanced image resolution and in computerized tomography scanning to reduce dose to patient. In the Phase I of this project, this project will focus on the related material development and upscaling to the real device size and address the technical challenges in integrating of perovskites with readout electronics. We will reduce the noise of the large area perovskite films with retained or improved sensitivity so that the detectors can measure X-ray at a much lower dose than the state-of-the-art commercial detectors.
