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NanoX - Modern X-ray Equipment
Modern X-ray equipment is said to have been digitalized. However, this change has only affected the image capturing, processing, and data storage section - not the actual X-ray tube itself. At the heart of every new X-ray tube, there still is a metal filament that has gone virtually unchanged for the past 100 years.
In the early days of the 21st century, several big X-ray players tried implementing non-thermionic electron emission technology, called "Cold Cathode" technology - but none achieved significant success. Consequently, medical X-ray tubes still operate using thermionic emission, when all other thermionic tubes are gone in other technology fields. Nanox has a Cold Cathode technology that has solely proved its viability in the electronics industry, successfully upgraded the performance to medical applications, and is developing radiological systems that break some limitations impeded by the traditional hot cathode
What is a Cold Cathode?
The term "cold cathode" refers to a cathode that is not electrically heated by a filament. While a filament boils off electrons by using heat (called a thermionic emission) - a cold cathode (or a "field emitter") extracts electrons from the metal by an external electric field.
A field emission device is characterized by
- A structure to create a strong electric field.
- A method to control the electric field and volume of the emitted electrons.
Origin
Cold Cathode technologies attracted first professional interest in the late 1990s to early 2000s when flat panels were considered for big-screen solutions. To make a thin flat CRTs, almost all electronics makers of the world joined the race to develop Field Emission Displays (FEDs). In the display panel, millions of small pixels must be driven independently. Therefore, all research projects adopted micro-gate construction.
From the 1990s, many electronics companies, including Motorola, Toshiba, Hitachi, Samsung, and others, tried to develop a flat TV based on cold cathode technology. All failed.
However, there was one company, Field Emission Technologies, a Sony spin-off arm, who developed the technical know-how to produce the world`s first high-quality FED (Field Emission Display) panel. While the cold cathode principle was not new to scientific researchers, they battled to obtain ample and stable electrons in a non-heat driven emission platform.
Nanox had acquired this technology and ported it to the medical imaging field.
Use In Medical Imaging
In the medical imaging sector, using a Field-Emission-type X-ray tube has several desirable properties: