Performance evaluation of a controlled drift detector for diffraction enhanced breast imaging

Diffraction enhanced breast imaging could potentially give a significant increase in contrast and sensitivity to tissue type with respect to conventional transmission X-ray mammography. A device that looks extremely promising for this application area is the controlled drift detector as it has the basic features of a charge-coupled device in terms of small pixel size but it is superior to the charge-coupled device in certain key areas as it can operate (a) in photon counting mode measuring the energy with spectroscopic resolution, (b) at very high frame rates (up to 100 kHz) and it can potentially be constructed to a large area linear device. The first results of a thorough performance evaluation of the controlled drift detector in its application to diffraction enhanced breast imaging are presented and discussed