Black & White X-Rays are so last year. Any doctor worth his sheep skin will want to upgrade to full color x-rays to improve their diagnostic abilities.
In the future doctors will be able to find more tumors at an early stage while using a smaller x-ray dose for each examination. Color x-rays offer new possibilities for medical diagnoses.
Digital color x-rays are based on the same advanced technology that is used when nuclear physicists look for new elementary particles. The great scientific challenge in constructing a color x-ray camera is to be able to shrink the large-scale detection equipment used by nuclear physicists to the microscopic format.
The readout electronics for each pixel in the camera’s picture sensor must be squeezed into an area of 55 x 55 μm, and what’s more be x-ray safe. The Mid Sweden University researchers have solved these design problems. Furthermore, they have shown that Medipix2 can be used to reduce the radiation dosage in dental x-rays. Industry also expects to be able to use the technology to see the consistency of materials using x-rays.
“With our digital color x-rays it will be possible to cut the radiation risk in half for x-ray examinations,” says Börje Norlin.
Using advanced computer simulations of the next generation of x-ray cameras, Mid Sweden University has also developed ways to enhance the quality of color x-rays.
These cameras will have higher resolution and be able to show more colors of higher quality.