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, imager using low noise CCDs. The HRGI operates in photon counting mode using a peltier cooler to achieve an operating temperature of -5/spl deg/C. We have measured the spatial resolution and efficiency of a prototype CCD from e2v Technologies Ltd coated with a 500-/spl mu/m-thick Gadox (Gd/sub 2/O/sub 2/S(Tb)) layer using 59.5 keV radiation from a /sup 241/Am source and 140 keV gamma-rays from a /sup 99 m/Tc source. We also describe our first images using /sup 99 m/Tc phantoms.