Characterizing how light propagates within scintillators could help improve medical imaging

While x-ray imaging has been used for medical diagnoses for more than a century, scientists have not been able to precisely describe how light moves within nontransparent scintillators – the key component in large area x-ray detectors. When excited by ionizing radiation, scintillators emit visible light that is used to form an image. For the first time, scientists at Stony Brook University have directly characterized the physics of how light propagates within scintillators used in medial flat panel detectors. Their findings, detailed in this paper, could be a significant step toward developing even more efficient x-ray detectors to improve medical imaging and diagnoses.

X-ray dose efficiency is critical to medical imaging, as x-rays can be harmful to patients and increase their cancer risk. The researchers also anticipate that by understanding the physics of how light moves within scintillators, newer x-ray detector technologies can be developed to push the limits of x-ray image quality.