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X-ray 'Ghost Images' Could Cut Radiation Doses (sciencemag.org)
Sophia Chen, writing for Science magazine: On its own, a single-pixel camera captures pictures that are pretty dull: squares that are completely black, completely white, or some shade of gray in between. All it does, after all, is detect brightness. Yet by connecting a single-pixel camera to a patterned light source, a team of physicists in China has made detailed x-ray images using a statistical technique called ghost imaging, first pioneered 20 years ago in infrared and visible light. Researchers in the field say future versions of this system could take clear x-ray photographs with cheap cameras -- no need for lenses and multipixel detectors -- and less cancer-causing radiation than conventional techniques.
"Our system is much smaller and cheaper, and it could even be portable if you needed to take it into the field," says Wu Ling-An, a physicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing whose work with her colleagues was published on 28 March in Optica. The researchers' system still isn't ready to be used in medicine. But they have lowered the x-ray dose by about a million times compared with earlier attempts, says Daniele Pelliccia, who in 2015 made some of the first x-ray ghost images.
"Our system is much smaller and cheaper, and it could even be portable if you needed to take it into the field," says Wu Ling-An, a physicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing whose work with her colleagues was published on 28 March in Optica. The researchers' system still isn't ready to be used in medicine. But they have lowered the x-ray dose by about a million times compared with earlier attempts, says Daniele Pelliccia, who in 2015 made some of the first x-ray ghost images.
Yes. According to the TFA,
he used a building-size source of intense x-rays called a synchrotron, but Wu's group made do with a compact tabletop source.
Now, what's really interesting is that while the total exposure for an image is about the same, the power is reduced and the time is increased greatly. As I understand, that reduces the risk posed by the radiation.
Radiation exposure is a cumulative dose over your lifetime, so I don't see how this makes any difference in this context.
However, in radiation treatments, the radiation side effects are mitigated by breaking the the total dose into a bunch of smaller ones. This is called fractionation.
The dose emitted during a standard x-ray or computed tomography (CT) is not problematic and causes no immediate side effects.