Computer Tomography (CT)

Medical professionals are constantly pushing CT imaging equipment manufacturers to provide higher resolution images, which allow for more accurate diagnosis of a patient’s condition, while at the same time keeping X-ray dosage to a minimum, to reduce the risk to the patient’s health when undergoing a scan.

 

New generations of detector solutions from ams are helping equipment makers to achieve both of these goals, giving reductions in X-ray doses while producing motion-free CT images.

 

The reason for the ams detectors’ superior performance is that they reduce noise in the sensitive analog signal chain between the photodiode and the high-speed ADC. ams technologies also eliminate the dead time which is required in the operation of many ADCs, maximizing the linearity of the output.

 

Digital X-ray

Digital X-ray equipment is widely used in general radiography, mammography and interventional radiology. The integrated flat-panel detectors in digital X-ray equipment are required to produce high-resolution, low-noise images while operating at high scanning rates.

 

Sensor interface solutions from ams for these flat panel detectors help digital X-ray equipment manufacturers to produce accurate X-ray images and to increase scanning rates.

 

The ams products for digital X-ray equipment include high-speed readout circuits and gate drivers optimized for line times as low as 15µs. These devices are used in fluoroscopy equipment helping to increase the frame rate in dynamic X-ray applications.

 

For static X-ray equipment using portable and battery-powered flat panels, ams offers readout circuits which dissipate as little as 1.1mW per channel. This low power dissipation enables the equipment to perform more X-ray exposures before the detector has to be recharged, thus increasing patient throughput.

Endoscopy

An endoscope inserted into the body enables a medical practitioner to examine the inside of the patient. The camera at the tip of the endoscope must be as small as possible, to minimize the patient’s discomfort.

 

Endoscopes equipped with an ams NanEye miniature camera module can have a remarkably narrow tip:  the area of a NanEye module – a complete digital camera-on-chip – is <0.5mm2. 

ams also offers expertise in integration to help medical equipment manufacturers to develop miniature cameras for micro-invasive surgery.

 

Manufacturers may also draw on ams expertise in the integration of wafer-level optics, which enables the production of a complete endoscopy system-in-package (SiP). Such SiP solutions offer the most effective way to reduce both the size and cost of an endoscope.