Development of microbeam irradiation system for radiobiology

In order to evaluate the risk of low dose or low dose rate irradiation, a microbeam irradiation system has been proposed, which overcomes the difficulty due to the Poisson distribution of hit-cell in the majority of non-hit cell population. Designed system has the following specifications; proposed X-ray beam size is 1 μm which is small enough to aim at cell nucleus (a few microns) in the energy range of from 5 to 10 keV; cells grown on a specially designed dish are automatically recognized and individually irradiated with vertically deflected upward beam through the film; cell recognition and irradiation are performed automatically with speed of more than 1000 cells/h.