A team of engineers at the University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC) have built a laboratory-scale device that sensitively detects what are called “soft X-rays” that they say offers tremendous potential in breast cancer detection and treatment.
There’s nothing available on the market that covers this range of X-rays,” says Dr. Krishna Mandal, the associate professor of electrical engineering who led the project. “Nobody has explored this region, and there will be many innovations that will result from our being able to do so, particularly when it comes to medical imaging.”
If you take mammography as an example, hard X-rays pose difficulties,” Mandal said. “First, they have very high energy, and so we have to minimize exposure to them. And more importantly, the soft X-rays interact with calcifications in the tissue. Hard X-rays do not – they just pass through calcium deposits,” he said. So soft X-ray devices potentially pose less harm to patients than those based on hard X-rays.
Calcium deposits in the breast represent an very promising target for detailed soft X-ray mapping, Mandal explained. He envisions the new soft X-ray detectors being at the forefront of a new way of imaging breast tissue, so that physicians can follow the progression of calcification over time.
