The SYRMEP Beamline of Elettra: Clinical Mammography and Bio-medical Applications

At the S Ynchrotron Radiation for MEdical Physics (SYRMEP) beamline of Elettra Synchrotron Light Laboratory in Trieste (Italy), an extensive research program in bio-medical imaging has been developed since 1997. The core program carried out by the SYRMEP collaboration concerns the use of Synchrotron Radiation (SR) for clinical mammography with the aim of improving the diagnostic performance of the conventional technique. The first protocol with patients, started in 2006 has been completed at the end of 2009 and the data analysis is now in progress. Regarding applications different from clinical imaging, synchrotron X-ray computed microtomography (micro-CT) is the most used technique, both in absorption and phase contrast. A new software tool, Pore3D, has been developed to perform a quantitative morphological analysis on the reconstructed slices and to access textural information of the sample under study.