X-ray dual-mode imager comprising radiography and coherent scatter

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Despite the advances in MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), nuclear medicine, and ultrasound, x-ray imaging continues to be a principal medical tool to look inside the body. Physics innovations and current detector technologies now allow x rays to be used in new ways to generate more information. These approaches can be used for other types of x-ray imaging, such as security inspection of packages. 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. In recent years we have built a prototype scatter imaging system at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron in Saskatoon, and then a more practical system in our lab at Carleton University in Ottawa using a conventional x-ray source. We have investigated means to make the x-ray acquisition as fast as possible and have achieved scan times of a few minutes at the synchrotron and under 10 minutes with the conventional source. We will: (1) Apply our system to the imaging of bone and cartilage samples to better characterize bone health and diagnose osteoporosis. (2) Investigate ways to make a high-resolution conventional image at the same time as the scatter image. 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 technologcal approach has been further refined.