Charge Coupled Devices as Autoradiography Imagers

The charge collected in the depletion region of a charge coupled device (CCD) owing to the passage of low energy beta-particles is exploited in order to obtain localized information of the hits distribution from exposure to radioactively labelled test patterns. An image field of 8.64×5.82 mm2 is stored as a matrix of 290×218 pixels each represented by an 8 bit word. Factors governing system performance are analyzed and compared with conventional autoradiography.