Digital x-ray camera for precision mammographic needle biopsy system

Abstract

An imaging system for a precision mammographic needle biopsy system includes an x-ray camera whose housing includes a compression panel for the breast, a portion of the compression panel being transparent to X-rays that have passed through the breast so that the surface on which the breast is positioned forms the outside surface of the camera head. Adjacent the interior of the transparent surface, are a scintillator and optics for guiding an image formed when X-rays impinge upon the scintillation material to a CCD board within a hermetically sealed inner camera housing. The optics are in the form of a fiber optic coupler made up of a bundle of coherent optical fibers having scintillation material coated at ends thereof to provide appropriate magnification of the image, thereby eliminating the need for lenses or mirrors, image intensifiers, and the like, and providing improved resolution because of the direct coupling of the scintillation material at the ends of the fibers and the CCD array. The x-ray camera contains within its housing all necessary analog and digital circuitry, including clock signal generating circuitry, power and control circuitry, an analog-to-digital converter, and a digital bus interface, for processing and converting a captured image into a digital image suitable for transmission over a standard digital bus for further processing, the camera thus being compatible, without modification, with a wide variety of controllers and imaging processing equipment.