Experimental Demonstration of Soft-Tissue Muon Scattering Tomography

Abstract

Muons have fascinated physicists since their discovery in cosmic rays almost a century ago. Their large mass and relatively long lifetime allow relativistic muons to traverse large amounts of matter, a property that has been exploited to probe otherwise inaccessible structures, from volcanoes and archaeological monuments to shielded nuclear materials. Here, we experimentally demonstrate for the first time that muon scattering tomography can be extended to biological soft tissue. We image an anthropomorphic thorax phantom using a 2 GeV/c muon beam at the CERN Proton Synchrotron and reconstruct its three-dimensional scattering density from the measured deflections of individual muons. Despite the weak scattering produced by tissue-equivalent materials, the reconstructed density agrees with the expectation from simulation at the percent level. Our results extend muon imaging into a previously unexplored regime and open the possibility of using muons as a complementary probe for medical imaging.