Project description
Innovative design for flexible X-ray imaging detectors
X-ray imaging is instrumental for a wide range of applications, such as medicine, food security, industrial non-destructive testing (NDT) and particle physics, but existing methods remain restricted in terms of flexibility and material cost. Inherent inflexibility of the digital electronics and scintillating materials that are applied in charge-integrating and particle-counting detectors results in inaccurate imaging of complex geometries due to geometric magnification. This represents a severe problem for industrial NDT and medical applications. Also, existing designs require both scintillating material and electronic hardware systems to be placed across the beam path, resulting in increased manufacturing and maintenance costs. The EU-funded FleX-RAY project intends to re-define X-ray detectors through a completely innovative architecture that places the electronic hardware outside the beam path, leading to reduced material and manufacturing costs.
Objective
X-ray imaging is a key component of applications ranging from medicine and food to security and industrial non-destructive testing (NDT). Current approaches to X-ray detection however are limited with respect to shape flexibility and material cost.
Inherent inflexibility of the digital electronics and scintillating materials used both in charge integrating and particle counting detectors leads to inaccurate imaging of complex geometries due to geometric magnification. This is particularly problematic in industrial NDT where defects in complex shapes are easy to miss, and in medical applications where early detection of abnormalities can make the difference between life and death. In medical applications, the inability to resolve complex features within the human body is offset by higher radiation dosage, thereby increasing health risks.
Moreover, current architectures require the hardware and electronic systems to be placed across the beam path. Thus, they need to be radiation-hardened sacrificing pixel density, greatly increasing the cost of manufacturing, limiting shelf life and making maintenance practically impossible.
FleX-RAY completely redefines X-ray detectors by introducing an utterly novel design where the hardware and electronics for detection are placed outside of the beam path, greatly reducing material and manufacturing costs. Our architecture achieves unprecedented versatility as multiple grids of fibres can be stacked to enable finer resolutions as well as particle tracking capabilities. Finally, by leveraging fiber Bragg gratings, our detector’s shape can be interrogated in real-time removing the need to know the imaged geometry beforehand.
Our project brings together cross-disciplinary expertise in materials, fibre optics, analogue and digital electronics and particle physics to produce the world’s first ultra-flexible, low-cost, self-shape reporting X-ray detector that will enable 10x higher resolution at half the price of current approaches.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringfibers
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicsgeometry
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringdigital electronics
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticsfibre optics
- natural sciencesphysical sciencestheoretical physicsparticle physicsphotons
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
152 31 CHALANDRI
Greece