Cosmic ray radiography of a human phantom

Abstract

Cosmic ray muons, that reach the earth's surface, provide a natural source of radiation that is used for radiography. In this paper, we show that radiography using cosmic radiation background provides a method that can be used to monitor bulk aspects of human anatomy. We describe a method that can be used to measure changes in patients as a function of time by radiographing them using cosmic-ray muons. This could provide hourly readouts of parameters such as lung density with sufficient sensitivity to detect time changes in inflammation of the lungs in, e.g., Covid patients.