Scientists have successfully produced an exceptionally efficient, robust and flexible scintillation film to bring significant improvements in X-ray imaging, enabling much lower radiation doses to be used.
Scintillation materials release visible light, or “scintillate,” in response to absorbing high-energy X-ray photons, enabling an image to be captured.
Researchers are continually exploring ways to make scintillation technology more sensitive, efficient and readily adaptable. The researchers, led by Omar F Mohammed, Associate Professor of Chemical Sciences at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), sought to come up with an improved scintillation screen.
“Currently used materials suffer from several drawbacks, including complex and high-cost fabrication processes, radioluminescence afterglow and nontunable scintillation,” said Yang Zhou, a postdoc in Prof Mohammed’s lab.
Materials called lead halide perovskites have attracted considerable attention and shown significant promise. Novel perovskites are a category of materials that share the same crystal structure as the natural perovskite mineral calcium titanium oxide, but they include a variety of different atoms that replace all or some of those found in natural perovskite.
To avoid toxicity problems and reduce cost, the researchers explored the use of elements besides lead. The newly developed screens are described in ACS Energy Letters.
The flexible scintillation screens the team developed can detect X-rays at ultralow levels, “approximately 113 times lower than a typical standard dose for X-ray medical imaging,” said Omar Mohammed, leader of the research group.
“Another vital advance is that the X-ray spatial resolution reported in this study is the highest achieved to date for powder-based screens,” said Dr Zhou.
“The physical flexibility of our films is also very important,” added Prof Mohammed. He explains that highly efficient flexible scintillation screens are urgently needed for using X-rays to better analyse awkward shapes.
The team plans to commercialise their advance, and to hope to refine their fabrication techniques.
Source: EurekAlert!
