Optical Density Control of Autoradiographs After Photographic Processing (Preliminary Results)

In many applications of photographic emulsions it would be desirable to control the optical density after the photographic processing. This would be useful for instance in certain problems of photographic dosimetry and particularly in many applications of autoradiography in medicine and biology. It would then be possible to recover information lost by overexposure as it frequently occurs unavoidably particularly in cases where important grain density variations are observed in the same autoradiograph specimen. The authors report the first results of an attempt to control the grain density after development and fixation of the photographic material by attacking the processed emulsion with diluted solutions of trypsin. By changing concentrations and temperature the attack can be made to proceed at any desirable speed so the trypsin solution acts like an ultra microtome removing very thin layers of the photographic emulsion. More important, the process could be followed continuously under the microscope by using a suitable chamber. Results are presented which suggest that this technique can give a rough idea of the incorporation with time of the radionuclide in the biological structure under observation. (author)