Neutron radiography may prove useful for diagnosis of bone tumors
Bone tumors may some day be diagnosed by neutron radiography just as rapidly as soft tissue tumors are now diagnosed from frozen sections.
The technique is still developing. For the immediate future, it will be available only to those medical centers with a nuclear reactor close by. Neutron radiography seems promising, however, because bone lesions can be identified this way in a matter of minutes—a task that now requires two to three weeks.
Philip J. Boyne, DMD, dean of the University of Texas Dental School at San Antonio, explained the possible biomedical applications of the technique at a recent neutron radiography conference at the National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, Md.
(Neutron radiography has a variety of non-medical applications, including nondestructive testing of materials, analysis of soils, electronic components, and museum objects, and the gauging of moisture content in food.)
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