This month's resources look at imaging as a part of Biomedical Engineering. The activity provides high school juniors and seniors with a Laboratory Demonstration of X-Ray Principles. By using a lamp with an incandescent light bulb to simulate an x-ray tube, these exercises teach students important principles of x-ray imaging without exposing them to ionizing radiation.

Light bulbs and x-ray tubes both emit photons so a light bulb can be used to simulate an x-ray tube. Photons from a light bulb do not penetrate through the human body in the same way that x-rays do. Photons from a light bulb do penetrate through transparency film, though. In this way, transparency film with shades of grayscale on it can be used to simulate the human body. In these laboratories, students will explore detector resolution, and they will be able to see and measure the geometric unsharpness effect. Biomedical engineers must account for these effects when designing x-ray imaging systems.

This resource comes from the VaNTH Engineering Research Center (ERC). In order to access curricular materials beyond the above link on the VaNTH ERC website above, you will need to agree to the VaNTH-ERC Courseware Non-Exclusive End User License Agreement. More information on this agreement can be found on the VaNTH ERC website.

This activity is brought to you by the new Engineering Pathway, a part of the National Science Digital Library. This collection includes resources from all over the Internet catalog just as Laboratory Demonstration of X-Ray Principles has been. The portal provides high-quality teaching and learning resources in applied science and math, engineering, computer science/information technology and engineering technology — for use by K-12 and university educators. The Engineering Pathway brings together quality engineering education materials from all over the internet, allowing teachers to search all of these documents in a single location.