A revolutionary X-ray innovation is set to transform cancer treatment and clinical radiography. Lumitron Technologies, Inc. (Irvine, CA, USA), a company pioneering the development of a unique X-ray system, HyperVIEW EBCS, has announced that its underlying accelerator technology has successfully generated electron beams that, for the first time, enable electron FLASH radiotherapy for a variety of next generation cancer treatments.

The accelerator that produced these electron beams is part of Lumitron’s compact HyperVIEW EBCS (Extremely Bright Compton Source) X-ray technology. HyperVIEW is the most significant change in clinical and industrial X-ray imaging in over 125 years and will enable revolutionary new capabilities for medical imaging, therapy, materials detection, and other applications across multiple industries. Comparable in size to an MRI or CT instrument, HyperVIEW EBCS is designed to collide a beam of near-light-speed electrons with a laser beam to produce high-energy X-ray beams.

These beams will enable medical imaging at resolutions 1,000 times higher and/or doses 100 times lower than conventional X-rays, with dramatically shorter imaging times than conventional MRI of soft tissues. This will enable the first application of Phase Contrast Imaging outside of billion-dollar, large-scale synchrotron facilities and will allow practitioners to image down to a cellular level at the point of care, in a hospital or clinic. Advanced 3D manufacturing will benefit dramatically from Lumitron’s ability to image dense objects such as medical implants and aircraft turbine components with unprecedented accuracy and speed.

“Our accelerator has produced a train of 100 consecutive, high-charge and perfectly timed micro-bunches of electrons at 99.982% of the speed of light or an energy equivalent of 25 MeV, in ten billionths of a second. This ultrashort duration and high energy has the potential to dramatically reduce the side effects of conventional radiotherapy,” said Lumitron CTO and co-founder, Dr. Chris Barty.

“The system will provide up to a thousand times improvement in image detail, far lower X-ray dose and the ability to treat simultaneously at the same cellular level, which is set to transform the landscape for both patients and practitioners,” added Lumitron Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, Maurie Stang. 

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