X-ray scatter imaging: Cross sections, collimation, speed, and signal extraction

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Despite the advances in mri, nuclear medicine, and ultrasound, x-ray imaging remains the main tool used in medicine to look inside the body. Physics innovations now suggest new ways of using x rays to capture more information.** All medical x-ray imaging today uses the "primary" or transmitted x rays to form a "shadow" picture of the patient. Scattered x rays, however, comprise up to 90% of the radiation at the image receptor and are another information source. Our lab's focus is to develop an x-ray imaging system that uses scatter as well as primary.** We will: (1) Complete building a library of diffraction signals of tissues, notably brain grey and white matter, and tracers for bone metabolism, using instrumentation developed at Carleton University. (2) Continue our work at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron in Saskatoon to design geometries of the radiation beam (collimation) for x-ray scatter imaging. We are using the BioMedical Imaging & Therapy beamline at CLS, whose monoenergetic beam and radiation instrumentation provide an ideal environment for machine development. We seek the best tradeoff between scanning a single narrow beam in tandem with a pixelated scatter detector over the patient, which will be prohibitively slow but will capture all scatter information unambiguously, versus multibeam geometries in which the scatter patterns overlap, which will speed acquisition but require untangling algorithms to use. So far, we have demonstrated 5-beam imaging with a digital detector and successful disentanglement. (3) We will commence biomedical applications, starting with imaging tracers for bone metabolism, and prostate imaging. (4) We will transfer the concept to standard x-ray systems such as in hospitals.** These innovations in x-ray imaging are commercializable and applicable beyond medicine to industrial nondestructive testing, to security imaging, and to all other areas in which x rays are shone through an object. We will seek further funding to help commercialize once the basic approach has been established.****************************