• Question: How can you use computer science to find out and discover how an xray can damage human skin?

    Asked by tommo to Jonny on 13 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      Have a look at the answer I’ve given to explain why X-rays can cause damage to human skin and other materials: /lutetiumj15-zone/2015/06/13/what-can-happens-when-we-get-x-rayed-that-can-damage-our-bodys/

      In the research group that I’m in I try to write code to help understand what happens when X-rays are fired at biological materials like liquids and solid crystals that contain proteins but this can be extended to look at human skin.

      First we have to understand what can happen when X-rays come into contact with a material. X-rays have a certain probability that they will not interact with the human. But they also have a probability that they will bounce off and change direction – in a similar manner to a ball bouncing off another in snooker. Finally they have a probability that they will be absorbed by the skin. This is what we hope doesn’t happen because this causes the damage.

      The program we have written calculates how much energy is absorbed by a material (which can include human skin) when X-rays are fired at it. When the amount of energy absorbed reaches a certain level we can say that this it too dangerous and you shouldn’t fire that much.

      The reason we need computer science is because the number of X-rays that we fire is about 1,000,000,000,000 (one thousand billion) X-ray particles a second. Now I don’t think I could calculate the number of these particles that were absorbed with a pen a paper in my lifetime. So we write computer programs to do these calculations for us.

      For many problems these days, especially in science, we write computer programs to do calculations that would take us way too long to do by hand.

      I hope that answers your question.

      If you’re interested, the website for our energy calculation program is here: http://www.raddo.se/

      It’s written in a programming language called Java and you can see the code that I write along with the other members of the group that I’m in here (But it’s quite in-depth so don’t worry if you don’t understand it): https://github.com/GarmanGroup/RADDOSE-3D

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