Characterizing Emerging Detector Materials for Low-Dose X-Ray Imaging

Modern clinical diagnostics significantly rely on X-ray medical imaging detectors, which play a key role in obtaining high-quality images while ensuring patient radiation exposure adheres to the "as low as reasonably achievable" principle. The last decade has seen a renewed exploration of promising materials for X-ray detection, foremost focusing on lead-based perovskites and other metal halides as direct-conversion semiconductors and scintillators. However, the reported performance characteristics, particularly X-ray sensitivity and the limit of dose rate detection, are often incomplete or misleading for assessing the practical utility of materials. This perspective surveys various approaches to the X-ray detector characterization of emerging materials, specifically focusing on Detective Quantum Efficiency within the context of low-dose medical imaging applications. Guidelines are provided for choosing, estimating, and presenting the relevant figures of merit, encompassing Detection Efficiency, Noise Equivalent Dose, response time, and spatial resolution, accompanied by ready-to-use computational tools, including a MATLAB application, a Mathcad worksheet, and an interactive website.