X-ray imaging in medicine, industry, and security can be limited by low material contrast. Our lab's focus is to develop a higher-contrast imager that acquires multiple categories of x-ray information. Our current system acquires not only the conventional transmitted radiation, but also the signature of scattered radiation versus angle, out to about 10 degrees. At a basic level this is akin to combining bright field and dark-field imaging in microscopy. X-ray pencil beams are scanned over the object, the resulting radiation distributions are recorded, and point-by-point a stack of scatter images at different angles plus a transmitted image are built.
A particular medical application is to bone mineral densitometry. Conventionally, this is measured using dual-energy radiography, which makes two transmission images using very different x-ray spectra. The goal of the USRA project will be to implement and optimize dual-energy imaging on our SPSxi, thus providing at each location an extra category of information on bone health.
The project will involve experiments with x rays, data capture, and especially data correction and software development. Demonstrated ability to create new scripts in Python and Matlab would be good preparation. It will be a great opportunity to learn fundamentals of radiation physics and image capture while enhancing programming skills.
Supervisor: Prof. Paul Johns, johns
physics [dot] carleton [dot] ca