Polarization enhanced X-ray imaging for biomedicine

Polarization is an inherent wave property of photons which is yet to be fully exploited in biomedical applications of X-ray imaging. Here, we present a case study to demonstrate how the dependence of X-ray scattering on photon polarization state can be used to improve current biomedical imaging techniques. We present a model for coincidence detection in positron emission tomography (PET) that takes advantage of X-ray polarization information independently of photon energy. Our preliminary results show that the polarization correlation of annihilation photons can dramatically improve the accuracy of identifying true coincidence events in PET, especially for high pair emission rates. This has direct implications for image quality, since the signal-to-noise could in principle be dramatically improved by eliminating false positive events and reducing the number of photons that would otherwise be discarded in multiple events. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.