The use of scintillating materials in the detection of ionising radiation for medical imaging is the main topic of this book. It starts with an overview of the state of the art in using radiation detectors for medical imaging, followed by an in depth discussion of all aspects of the use of scintillating materials for this application. Possibilities to improve the performance of existing scintillating materials and completely new ideas on how to use scintillating materials are discussed in detail. The first 4 chapters contain a general overview of the applications of radiation detectors in medicine and present a closer look at the 3 most important subfields, X-ray imaging, gamma ray imaging and PET. One chapter is devoted to semiconductor detectors, a promising new area, and two chapters are devoted to recent technical advances in PET. The remaining 5 chapters deal with scintillating materials and their use in medical imaging.

Since their discovery by Becquerel and RAntgen, ionising radiation and detectors for ionising radiation have played an ever more important role in medical diagnostics and therapy. The use of scintillating materials in the detection of ionising radiation for medical imaging is the main topic of this book intended for an audience of physicists and engineers. The book will be useful both to new researchers entering the field and to experts interested to learn about the latest developments.

It starts with an overview of the state of the art in using radiation detectors for medical imaging, followed by an in depth discussion of all aspects of the use of scintillating materials for this application. Possibilities to improve the performance of existing scintillating materials and completely new ideas on how to use scintillating materials are discussed in detail. The first 4 chapters contain a general overview of the applications of radiation detectors in medicine and present a closer look at the 3 most important subfields, X-ray imaging, gamma ray imaging and PET. One chapter is devoted to semiconductor detectors, a promising new area, and two chapters are devoted to recent technical advances in PET. The remaining 5 chapters deal with scintillating materials and their use in medical imaging.

I have been teaching courses on experimental techniques in nuclear and particle physics to master students in physics and in engineering for many years. This book grew out of the lecture notes I made for these students. The physics and engineering students have rather different expectations of what such a course should be like. I hope that I have nevertheless managed to write a book that can satisfy the needs of these different target audiences. The lectures themselves, of course, need to be adapted to the needs of each group of students. An engineering student will not qu- tion a statement like "the velocity of the electrons in atoms is ?1% of the velocity of light", a physics student will. Regarding units, I have written factors h and c explicitly in all equations throughout the book. For physics students it would be preferable to use the convention that is common in physics and omit these constants in the equations, but that would probably be confusing for the engineering students. Physics students tend to be more interested in theoretical physics courses. However, physics is an experimental science and physics students should und- stand how experiments work, and be able to make experiments work.This is an open access book.