SYnchrotron Radiation for MEdical Physics

The SYRMEP (SYnchrotron Radiation for MEdical Physics) beamline has been designed by Sincrotrone Trieste, in cooperation with the University of Trieste and the INFN, for research in medical diagnostic radiology. The light source is the first bending magnet of section n. 6. The optics is based on a double-crystal Si (111) monochromator which works in an energy range between 8 keV and 35 keV. The beamline provides at a distance of about 20 m from the source, a monochromatic, laminar-section X-ray beam with a maximum area of 120×4 mm2. The beamline is designed to take X-Ray images of in vitro samples. The main systems of detection are a CCD detector, an off-line imaging plate and a system for high-resolution X-ray films.

The use of monochromatic and laminar-shaped beams allows, in principle, an improvement of the clinical quality of images and a reduction of adsorbed dose (because of both monochromaticity and scatter reduction). A considerable interest is generated by a digital detector (under commissioning) which presents a high contrast resolution and a very wide dynamic range. Moreover, the spatial coherence of the SYRMEP source is used to overcome the poor absorption contrast of many biological samples, by the use of phase-contrast techniques. A powerful technique as Diffraction Enhanced Imaging (DEI) is also routinely applied.

The horizontal acceptance covered by the light-port of the front-end is 7 mrad. The beamline is constituted of a Be window which cuts the low energy component of the beam, the entrance slits systems, the monochromator and the exit slits.

The available imaging techniques of the SYRMEP beamline are conventional absorption radiology and tomography, phase contrast imaging, diffraction enhanced imaging.

Areas of research

• Mammography
• Medical Radiology
• X-Ray Dosimetry
• Biomaterials Imaging
• Composite Materials and Light Alloys Imaging

On-line data analysis

The SYRMEP beamline represents a complex data collection process, with specific processing, storage, anaysis and sharing and visualisation requirements. This kind of application requires both the support of a standard Grid computing environment, that is a virtual organisation, a set of distributed storage and computing resources and some resource brokering mechanism, a workflow definition and execution environment and the capability to integrate instruments (the detectors) and interactively collaborate in the data analysis process.