Wearable X-ray-detecting fabric offers a flexible alternative to current imaging tech

Since their discovery by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895, X-rays have become a staple of modern medical care, from imaging teeth and broken bones to screening for the early signs of breast cancer.

The most common type of X-ray detector used in medical imaging today utilizes materials known as scintillators, which are made of inorganic and rigid compounds. This inherent lack of flexibility limits their applications and often requires patients to contort their bodies to accommodate unyielding medical equipment.

This rigidity has created a demand among researchers and the medical community for scintillating materials that are robust, efficient, and flexible. Past attempts to meet this demand, however, have had to sacrifice durability and efficiency for flexibility. An innovative fabric made of flexible inorganic fibers shows remarkable promise and may meet all three requirements.

New results published in the open-access journal Science Advances describe a new, all-inorganic, flexible “metafabric” scintillator that boasts an output 10 times higher than previous flexible polymer-based scintillators.

This fabric, developed by Li Xu and her team at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, could revolutionize how X-ray imaging is performed and could potentially enable wearable health monitoring and X-ray shielding.

“This work offers a previously undefined paradigm for a scintillator system design strategy that maintains the high performance of inorganic scintillators while adding the functionality of being conformally flexible and wearable as fabrics,” noted Xu.

When high-frequency X-rays strike the atoms in a scintillation-based detector, they excite the electrons in the material, raising them to a higher-energy level. As the electrons relax and return to their lower-energy state, they re-emit that energy as visible photons, which are then picked up by a photodetector, converted to an electric signal, amplified, and analyzed to form an image.

The efficiency of any scintillating material is directly proportional to the atomic number of its constituent elements: the higher the atomic number, or Z-number, the better the material is at converting X-rays to visible light.

Until now, to achieve flexibility, scintillators were made from either low Z-number organic materials or polymers embedded with inorganic nanoscale powders. Both of these approaches are less efficient than rigid scintillators made from materials like gadolinium oxysulfide doped with terbium (Gd₂O₂S:Tb) and perovskites (CaTiO₃).

To achieve their breakthrough design and convert otherwise rigid scintillators into flexible fabric forms, the researchers used a process known as sol-gel electrospinning, which (as its name suggests) uses an electric field to pull and stretch a gel-crystalline mixture into remarkably fine strands of inorganic fibers.

This approach transformed the otherwise brittle inorganic scintillators into a metafabric, dubbed X-Wear, which can be woven into a variety of shapes and sizes. The fabric is also “breathable” and can be seamlessly integrated into wearable technology.

This study primarily demonstrated the proof of concept of the team’s design. Its integration with flexible photodetectors, however, has not yet been realized. Other potential limitations include the material’s safety for direct skin content and its cost-effectiveness for large-scale manufacturing.

If realized, however, its potential applications include wearable X-ray imaging for medical diagnostics, mobile health platforms for on-the-go X-ray imaging, visual radiation monitoring in hazardous environments, and radiation shielding integrated into comfortable clothing.

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