Cosmic ray radiography of a human phantom

TL;DR

This paper explores using cosmic ray muons for non-invasive, real-time radiography of human anatomy, enabling monitoring of physiological changes such as lung inflammation over time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for cosmic-ray muon radiography to monitor human body changes dynamically, which is a new application of cosmic radiation in medical imaging.

Findings

Potential to detect lung inflammation changes in Covid patients

Method can provide hourly updates of internal physiological parameters

Demonstrates feasibility of cosmic-ray-based medical radiography

Abstract

Cosmic ray muons, that reach the earth's surface, provide a natural source of radiation that is used for radiography. In this paper, we show that radiography using cosmic radiation background provides a method that can be used to monitor bulk aspects of human anatomy. We describe a method that can be used to measure changes in patients as a function of time by radiographing them using cosmic-ray muons. This could provide hourly readouts of parameters such as lung density with sufficient sensitivity to detect time changes in inflammation of the lungs in, e.g., Covid patients.