Design Advantage
The principal application advantage of EBT tomographic CT machines, and the reason for the invention, is that because the X-ray source-point is swept electronically, not mechanically, it can be swept with far greater speed.
The major medical application for which this design technology was invented in the 1980s was for imaging the human heart. The heart never stops moving, and some important structures, such as arteries, move several times their diameter during each heartbeat. Rapid imaging is, thus, important to prevent blurring of moving structures during the scan. The most advanced current commercial designs can perform image sweeps in as little as 0.025 seconds. By comparison, the fastest mechanically swept X-ray tube designs require about 0.33 seconds to perform an image sweep. For reference, current coronary artery angiography imaging is usually performed at 30 frames/second or 0.033 seconds/frame; EBT is far closer to this than mechanically swept CT machines.
Read more about this topic: Electron Beam Tomography
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