End-to-end design of multicolor scintillators for enhanced energy resolution in X-ray imaging

Seokhwan Min; Seou Choi; Simo Pajovic; Sachin Vaidya; Nicholas Rivera; Shanhui Fan; Marin Soljačić; Charles Roques-Carmes

doi:10.1038/s41377-025-01836-8

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End-to-end design of multicolor scintillators for enhanced energy resolution in X-ray imaging

Original Articles

- End-to-end design of multicolor scintillators for enhanced energy resolution in X-ray imaging
- Light: Science & Applications Vol. 14, Issue 6, Pages: 1606-1617(2025)
- Affiliations：
  
  1.Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge 02139 MA, USA
  2.Department of Material Science and Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 291 Daehak-ro, Daejeon, 34141 Daejeon, Republic of Korea
  3.Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge 02139 MA, USA
  4.Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge 02139 MA, USA
  5.Department of Physics, Harvard University, Massachusetts Hall Cambridge, Cambridge 02138 MA, USA
  6.E. L. Ginzton Laboratories, Stanford University, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford 94305-2048 CA, USA
- Author bio：
  
  Charles Roques-Carmes (chrc@stanford.edu)
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1038/s41377-025-01836-8
  CLC：
- Received：15 October 2024，
  
  Revised：14 March 2025，
  
  Accepted：19 March 2025，
  
  Published Online：11 April 2025，
  
  Published：30 June 2025
- Accepted：
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Min, S. et al. End-to-end design of multicolor scintillators for enhanced energy resolution in X-ray imaging. Light: Science & Applications, 14, 1606-1617 (2025).
DOI：

Min, S. et al. End-to-end design of multicolor scintillators for enhanced energy resolution in X-ray imaging. Light: Science & Applications, 14, 1606-1617 (2025). DOI： 10.1038/s41377-025-01836-8.

摘要

Abstract

Scintillators have been widely used in X-ray imaging due to their ability to convert high-energy radiation into visible light

making them essential for applications such as medical imaging and high-energy physics. Recent advances in the artificial structuring of scintillators offer new opportunities for improving the energy resolution of scintillator-based X-ray detectors. Here

we present a three-bin energy-resolved X-ray imaging framework based on a three-layer multicolor scintillator used in conjunction with a physics-aware image postprocessing algorithm. The multicolor scintillator is able to preserve X-ray energy information through the combination of emission wavelength multiplexing and energy-dependent isolation of X-ray absorption in specific layers. The dominant emission color and the radius of the spot measured by the detector are used to infer the incident X-ray energy based on prior knowledge of the energy-dependent absorption profiles of the scintillator stack. Through ab initio Monte Carlo simulations

we show that our approach can achieve an energy reconstruction accuracy of 49.7%

which is only 2% below the maximum accuracy achievable with realistic scintillators. We apply our framework to medical phantom imaging simulations where we demonstrate that it can effectively differentiate iodine and gadolinium-based contrast agents from bone

muscle

and soft tissue.

关键词

Keywords

references

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