Krzysztof (Kris) Iniewski - Advanced X-Ray Radiation Detection:: Medical Imaging and Industrial Applications

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Doctors ability to diagnose and treat disease is defined by his or her ability to investigate and visualize the inner workings of living systems. Imaging technologies have become a central part of both everyday clinical practice and medical investigations. Their applications range from everyday clinical diagnosis to advanced studies of biological systems. Their relevance lays in many diverse areas in biology and medicine, such as diagnosis of cancer, assessment of the cardiovascular systems, or applications in neurosciences, to mention few examples.

Medical imaging represents an increasingly important component of modern medical practice, because early and accurate diagnosis can substantially influence patient treatment strategies and improve this treatment outcome and, by doing so, decrease both mortality in many diseases and improve life quality. It can also facilitate patient management issues and improve health-care delivery and the effectiveness of utilization of resources. The most current example is to use Computed Tomography (CT) to diagnose damage in lungs as a result of Covid-19 infection.

Depending on the physics and effects that are being used to obtain necessary imaging information, different modalities measure and visualize different characteristics of the investigated tissues or organs []. Attenuation of electromagnetic radiation lies behind X-ray imaging and computed tomography (CT); sound wave transmission and reflection are used in ultrasound (US) imaging; and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses magnetic field caused changes in hydrogen state of water molecules. The images created by most of these modalities display anatomy of the body, however some like Nuclear Medicine or functional MRI can represent body functions. The book focuses on detector for X-ray and gamma ray based imaging modalities as they both have common denominator: detection of number of photons and/or their energies.

Most medical X-ray imaging is based on a measurement of the X-ray beam attenuation. The attenuation is different for different tissues and may be additionally modified by the presence of contrast agents (e.g., intravenously administered iodine) if needed. There are several X-ray modalities widely used in medicine. Depending on their application, they can utilize different energies of radiation (e.g., lower energy in mammography than in radiography), or a different method of image creation (radiography vs computed tomography), but the basic scheme is always kept more or less the same; the patient is placed between a radiation source and radiation detector. The information from the detector is used to create an image.

In other medical imaging modalities, usually referred to as Nuclear Medicine, there is no X-ray tube, and the radiation source is directly injected inside the patient. The general term nuclear medicine encompasses several different imaging techniques, ranging from simple planar and whole-body studies to positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). All these diagnostic techniques create images by measuring electromagnetic radiation emitted by the tracer molecules which have been labeled with radioactive isotope and introduced into a patients body. Additionally, nuclear medicine includes internal radiotherapy (IRT) procedures where radioactive high-dose injections are being used in cancer treatment.