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Just as digital technologies have dramatically improved home audio and video fidelity, flat panel digital X-ray technology offers significant improvement in image quality and dose utilization. The performance of the flat panel detector imagers is rated as the value of DQE Detective Quantum Efficiency.

For far too long, the effective design and manufacture of a reliable and affordable digital X-ray radiographic imaging system has been in process, but not completely achieved. Finally, at the end of the last century, commercially available flat panel digital X-ray detectors using amorphous silicon found their permanent place in the X-ray imaging world.

In the current digital era, we are collecting, storing, analyzing and using more and more information at a faster and faster pace. X-ray imaging is no exception. The forces behind the digital X-ray revolution are much the same as those powering home and office technologies. Digital devices are smaller and more robust and once an image is digital, it becomes portable. The x-ray image can easily be made available in multiple locations at the same time, as it can be transmitted over long distances in real-time. Digital images make it possible to have computer-assisted diagnoses. Digital images are far simpler to archive and much less costly than their analog counterpart, film. Digital images, video sequences and even volumetric data sets are easily linked to a patient's electronic record. Just as digital technologies have dramatically improved home audio and video fidelity, digital X-ray technology offers significant improvement in image quality and dose utilization.

Medical modalities, such as CT, PET, SPECT, MRI and ultrasound are naturally digital. However, standard X-ray radiography and fluoroscopy are still mainly based on analog technologies; specifically, screen/film and the image intensifier. Flat panel detectors (FPDs) have emerged as the next generation digital X-ray technology. Flat panel X-ray imagers are based on solid-state integrated circuit (IC) technology, similar in many ways to the imaging chips used in visible wavelength digital photography and video.

A number of detector technologies have been developed based on amorphous silicon TFT (Thin Film Transistor) arrays, but the most successful and widely used detectors are called "indirect" detectors. These detectors are based on amorphous-silicon TFT/photodiode arrays coupled with X-ray scintillators.

With indirect digital X-ray imaging, an X-ray tube sends a beam of X-ray photons through a target. X-ray photons not absorbed by the target strike, a layer of scintillating material that converts them into visible light photons. These photons then strike an array of photodiodes which converts them into electrons that can activate the pixels in a layer of amorphous silicon. The activated pixels generate electronic data that a computer can convert into a high-quality image of the target, which is then displayed on a computer monitor.

MedWOW features a hugely representative selection of new, used and refurbished Flat Panel Digital X-Ray equipment, including complete systems manufactured by Adani, GE Healthcare, Philips, Shimadzu, Siemens and Toshiba and thousands of flat panel digital x-ray parts made by Camtronics Medical Systems, Esaote, GE Healthcare, Infimed, Philips, Shimadzu, Siemens and Toshiba.