LECTURE NOTES IN MEDICAL ENGINEERING

How X-rays form Images of the Body

X-Ray Detection

These are the lecture notes for FAU’s YouTube Lecture “Medical Engineering”. This is a full transcript of the lecture video & matching slides. The course is supported by a corresponding Open Access Book, and Open Source Slides (zenodo/github). We hope, you enjoy this as much as the videos. Of course, this transcript was created with deep learning techniques largely automatically and only minor manual modifications were performed. Try it yourself! If you spot mistakes, please let us know!

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Welcome back to medical engineering. Today we’ll look at the third part of X-rays and we want to discuss the actual detection of the X-rays on certain kinds of X-ray sensor technology. So now let’s have a look at our slides.

Image from the Medical Engineering lecture under CC BY 4.0.

So now we want to discuss the actual imaging and it is the last part in the chain.

Image from the Medical Engineering lecture under CC BY 4.0.

So we had the generation. We had the interaction with matter and then we want to convert now the X-rays into something that we can then display as an image. So we will discuss the following image intensifiers and flat-panel detectors. So these are two key technologies that are being used to detect. Nowadays most systems use flat-panel detectors. But I think if you see an image intensifier you should know how it works. This is why we still have it here in the set of slides and then we want to discuss shortly the sources of noise in X-ray imaging.

Image from the Medical Engineering lecture under CC BY 4.0.

These are the X-ray image intensifiers and they are essentially vacuum tubes that convert X-rays into visible light. The nice thing is that we can adjust the magnification in these systems on top. So there is electron optics that we look…