X-ray microbeam for speech research

A steerable X-ray beam system is being built for use in speech research. A beam of 150 keV to 600 keV electrons will be steered by a computer and the resulting X-rays will be selected by a pinhole to give a beam with a width of 0.6 mm. The X-ray beam will be used to follow about 8 gold pellets on tongue and throat surfaces at sampling frequencies of about 125 frames/s. The pattern recognition system and X-ray energies have been chosen to allow the tracking of pellets behind some teeth fillings of mercury amalgam and gold caps. (orig.)