Characterization of a double-sided silicon strip detector autoradiography system.

The most commonly used technology currently used for autoradiography is storage phosphor screens, which has many benefits such as a large field of view but lacks particle-counting detection of the time and energy of each detected radionuclide decay. A number of alternative designs, using either solid state or scintillator detectors, have been developed to address these issues. The aim of this study is to characterize the imaging performance of one such instrument, a double-sided silicon strip detector (DSSD) system for digital autoradiography. A novel aspect of this work is that the instrument, in contrast to previous prototype systems using the same detector type, provides the ability for user accessible imaging with higher throughput. Studies were performed to compare its spatial resolution to that of storage phosphor screens and test the implementation of multiradionuclide ex vivo imaging in a mouse preclinical animal study.