Portable Digital Field Panoramic x-ray

This proposal is to develop a panoramic, field portable, motionless, laminographic x-ray machine for medical analysis of soldiers with head injuries resulting from military battle. The scanning x-ray source is located near the head of the soldier and the divergent x-ray beam passing through the head is detected by an array of 64 detectors at some distance from it. All detectors acquire data simultaneously at different angles. Data are digitized and then stored and processed in a laptop computer. The final processed x-ray data are presented layer-by-layer at the display of the laptop. All 1000 layers (slices) are acquired in less than a minute and processed in less than 2 minutes. The image slices thus obtained have a spatial resolution of greater than 7 line pairs per mm, resolution in the third dimension less than 8 mils, and contrast sensitivity less than 2 parts per 1000. High contrast is largely due to reduced scatter as a result of the reverse geometry. The x-ray source, c-arm and detector array are designed so that each can be carried by a single person, and their assembly is made fast and simple.