Digital autoradiography imaging using CMOS technology: First tritium autoradiography with a back-thinned CMOS detector and comparison of CMOS imaging performance with autoradiography film

It has been shown that CMOS imaging technology can be applied to digital autoradiography (AR) as a potential imaging alternative technology to using conventional film emulsion. In this work a thorough investigation on the performance of CMOS technology used in AR is presented. ³H is a particularly important radioisotope used in AR because it can label many sites on biomolecules and provides the highest resolution images due to its low energy and hence low particle range compared to other beta-emitting radioisotopes. In order to detect beta-particles from ³H beta decay a back-thinned CMOS sensor has been used. Back-thinning is a standard process in CCDs but it is not widely applied to CMOS sensors. In this paper the first results of imaging a calibrated ³H microscale and the first tritiated autoradiogram obtained with a back-thinned CMOS sensor at room temperature are presented.