Koninklijke Philips Corporation N.v.

Aviv Marks

Tuvia Liran

Roland Proksa

Ewald Roessl

Jens-Peter Schlomka

A particle-counting apparatus is described, which reduces a resulting width of pulses when a charge pulse is received from a particle detector, thereby reducing pile-up problems with pulses. Pulse shortening is obtained by resetting the pulse shortly after it exceeds its peak level at the apparatus output. The apparatus includes a charge-sensitive amplifier and a shaper which generates an output for subsequent discrimination circuits. A reset generator monitors the shaper output and generates a reset signal to the shaper when a peak has been detected.

Particle-counting apparatus with pulse shortening

An apparatus includes a local minimum identifier () that identifies a local minimum between overlapping pulses in a signal, wherein the pulses have amplitudes that are indicative of the energy of successively detected photons from a multi-energetic radiation beam by a radiation sensitive detector, and a pulse pile-up error corrector () that corrects, based on the local minimum, for a pulse pile-up energy-discrimination error when energy-discriminating the pulses using at least two thresholds corresponding to different energy levels. This technique may reduce spectral error when counting photons at a high count rate.

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Aviv Marks