HIGH-PRESSURE MULTIWIRE PROPORTIONAL AND GAS MICROSTRIP CHAMBERS FOR MEDICAL RADIOLOGY

Application of MultiWire Proportional Chambers (MWPC) and MicroStrip Gas Chambers (MSGC) in medical radiography is discussed. These detectors are capable of detecting X-rays in counting mode with high efficiency, thus giving essential dose reduction compared to film/screen techniques. This was demonstrated on several Digital Radiographic Devices (DRD) with one-dimensional MWPC and scanning in the orthogonal direction. Effective pixel sizes of 1 mm and 0.5 mm for different devices with highly parallel readout systems has been achieved. The counting rate capability of DRDs is similar to 500 kHz/pixel, which is enough to get high statistics of X-rays with a short exposure. Dose saving factors from 1 to 2 orders of magnitude for several common examinations were demonstrated. Further development of this approach can be made with MSGC which reproduce operation of MWPC in a much smaller scale. First tests of prototype chambers with 200 mu m pitch of strips at high pressure have shown the possibility to reach a gain of similar to 10(4) in a 6 bar Xe mixture. A proper choice of substrate material permits one to avoid charging problems at high fluxes. These features allow, one to build a counting device with 0.2 mm pixels for the detection of X-rays of 20-60 keV.