Particle detectors for biomedical applications—demands and trends

The use of particle radiation has already, long since become a tool without which medicine and biomedicine would be unthinkable. Still, the X-ray film is the most frequently used particle detector in medicine. However, with the advent of the tomographic technique in nuclear medicine, other detector types like the scintillation detectors or ionization chambers such as scanning devices came into use. Recently, the principal advantages of digital radiography are being recognized increasingly. The transition to this new method of radiography is only possible through recent developments of new detectors and techniques. Most of them have been adopted from nuclear and particle physics. But they have to be adapted to the needs of the new field of application. In this paper I will first recall the needs for biomedical diagnostics using radiation and relate them to the requirements to be posed to the detector physics. Some examples of new concepts, technologies and methods for future biomedical applications are presented in the second part.