# Synchrotron X-ray Radiation (SXR) in Medical Imaging: Current Status and Future Prospects
## 3 Synchrotron X-ray Radiation in Medical Imaging
### Breast Cancer
The beam size was 100 \(\upmu\)m in the horizontal direction and 50 \(\upmu\)m in the vertical direction. Two dimensional diffraction patterns were obtained investigating three or more samples of each species on each of these beamlines. The dimension of the pixel of the image plates was 0.1 \(\times\) 0.1 mm [36,37]. Another group has utilized synchrotron X-ray nanoscopic 2D/3D imaging to investigate the structural variation for hair strands of breast cancer patients during cancerous progression and healthy individuals. Theoretically, a 30% efficiency was expected from this method. The first-order focal length was 40 mm at 6.78 KeV. The field of view was typically 110 lm diameter, with a resolution of 100 nm. A thin (18 lm) LSO: TB scintillator crystal (FEE, Germany) with a 10 lm diameter and a 203-lens handmade optical microscope make up the detector. A charge-coupled device with 203 objective lenses (Zeiss) made up the microscope. Each pixel on the CCD is 4096 \(\times\) 4096 pixels of 9 lm size. A holed aluminum-film phase plate with a diameter of 3.78 mm was used for Zernike phase contrast. Data from nanotography were collected using the same setup as previously described. Each specimen was rotated in place on a computer-controlled precision stage with an interval of 0.5 increments through 180, 0.5 s exposure duration per projection for data collection [13]. Nanoscopic projection and CT scanning of the hair samples were accomplished by a monochromatic synchrotron X-ray at the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory. The study revealed that there is a high correlation between the medulla loss demonstrated by the structural variations of the high-resolution synchrotron X-ray and the cancerous progression (as illustrated in Figure 3). The medulla loss is also age-dependent, which imposes a challenge to the accuracy of this technique. Recently, scientists have started looking for a more compact and cheap method to the high-resolution synchrotron X-ray imaging to image the internal structure of the hair. The healthy hair samples were undergone nanoscopic projection and CT scanning using a monochromatic synchrotron X-ray (6.78 keV) at the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory (PAL) 7C beamline. Reconstruction pictures of tomography data were created by utilizing the OCTOPUS software package to apply a filtered back-projection method on the projection image [38]. Notably, in this study, the authors developed cheap near-infrared microscopy (NIRM) to achieve a comparable high spatial resolution of the monochromatic synchrotron X-ray imaging. The developed NIRM was able to detect complete medulla loss (CML) per hair strand at (60.9 \(\pm\) 10.2%) (\(p<0.001\)) in the hair of all cancer patients than in the hair of either healthy individuals (less than 3.7 \(\pm\) 7.5%) or those with benign disease (30.6 \(\pm\) 5.9%). The method is based on photons scattering contrast between medulla and cortex tissue of hair. The study also compared the synchrotron X-ray nanotomography images to those acquired by NIRM of the same hair samples.