Applications to Optimization of X-Ray Radiographic Imaging ............................... Birsen Yazıcı, Il-Young Son, An Jin, and X. George Xu

In the United States, approximately 250 million radiological examinations are performed each year, making diagnostic medical examinations the largest source of man-made radiation exposure.1 A major goal of radiography is to maximize the amount of diagnostic information while minimizing the radiation exposure to the patient. All radiographic x-ray examinations require the selection of beam parameters, which affect both the patient dose and the corresponding image quality. Optimization is dif cult because

1. The x-ray imaging chain contains a large number of variables associated with the x-ray beam characteristics, the patient anatomy, the scatter removal grid, and the x-ray detector system.