The PICASSO digital detector for Diffraction Enhanced Imaging at ELETTRA

A clinical mammography program is in progress at the medical beamline SYRMEP of the Italian synchrotron radiation laboratory ELETTRA in Trieste. A conventional screen-film system is utilized as detector for the examinations on patients. For the next experimental step a digital detector has been designed taking into account the essential requirements for mammography such as high spatial and contrast resolution, high efficiency for low dose examinations and high speed for short acquisition time. A double-layer prototype has already been tested in the frame of the PICASSO project. In addition, an analyzer crystal set-up for Diffraction Enhanced Imaging (DEI) has been available for many years at the SYRMEP beamline. Applying the DEI technique several successful experiments have been carried out in biomedical imaging and in particular in-vitro breast imaging utilizing commercially available detectors. Recently a system upgrade yielded a double-crystal analyzer set-up with improved stability and higher angular resolution. In this study the PICASSO detector has been utilized in combination with the new analyzer set-up for imaging in-vitro breast tissue samples. In order to test the potential of the combined system planar and tomographic images have been acquired and the first results are here presented.