First 'perovskite camera' can see inside the human body | Hacker News Reader

First 'perovskite camera' can see inside the human body

news.northwestern.edu

53 pointsgeox16 comments

"While cheaper than CZT detectors, NaI detectors are bulky and produce blurrier images — like taking a photo through a foggy window."

I'm constantly amazed at what these articles do not show. Like if we have an example of a foggy window image and one from CZT and now one from this new sensor, why not show an example of each? A picture is worth a 1,000 words after all, so not including them really does the reader a disservice when reading these articles.

From this, it sounds like it hasn't been integrated into an imaging device yet:

"Record energy resolutions are achieved as 2.5% at 141 keV and 1.0% at 662 keV. Single photon imaging with single point and line 99mTc γ-ray sources showcases the high sensitivity of 0.13%~0.21% cps/Bq. Phantom imaging distinctly delineates individual column sources spaced 7 mm apart, indicative of an impressive spatial resolution of 3.2 mm. These findings lay the groundwork for integrating perovskite detectors into nuclear medicine γ-ray imaging systems, offering a balance of cost-effectiveness and superior performance."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63400-7

You may not hear, how expensive become now x-ray science, because safety regulations.

At Edison time, technologies was very unregulated, and because of this was cheap and easy achievable, but lot of people harmed, many just die.

Now you cannot just install other detector into existing (commercial) machine, because license for this machine is very strict, and don't accept any changes (or you will lost guarantee).

In developing countries, regulations usually not working so strict, but in developing countries x-ray machines are not so abundant, so they are just busy at working and have no spare time to make pictures for blog.

And if we choose scientific approach (not using commercial machine), to make x-ray machine from scratch, this is just another financial beast, magnitudes bigger.

So, when I see x-ray pictures in some "private" blog, I always wonder, if this is true private, and not another bubble, aimed to engage people and later sell them some other super-duper tech.

I see several comments here that misunderstand "perovskites", so to be clear: "perovskite" can refer to either the mineral or the crystal structures with the same structure as the mineral. Virtually everything written about "perovskites" refers to perovskite structures; the actual mineral perovskite is just used as a rock (geologists poke at it and miners crush it up.)

Perovskite structures are interesting because they have unique material properties. The range of properties is quite broad: ferroelectric, pyroelectric, and piezoelectric properties, photoelasticity, very high permittivity, et cetera. In popular science news, you will mostly read about potential uses in solar cells, but they are already commonly used in our world: barium titanate is used as a dielectric in capacitors, lead zirconium titanate is used as the piezoelectric crystal in many resonators, lithium niobate is used for optical waveguides and for optical antialiasing filters because of its birefringence.

Perovskites are research materials being researched.

Images produced from SPECT cameras have been around for a while. [2]

This is potentially a 16 pixel "camera" which the "image" is a gaussian blob (Figure 1e and 5e) [1].

This is interesting for a variety of reasons but is way overblown in the "camera" or "image" context. It's demonstration that one can make pixelated devices (4x4) of a specific kind of promising material.

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63400-7

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-photon_emission_compute...

ScholarlyArticle: "Single photon γ-ray imaging with high energy and spatial resolution perovskite semiconductor (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63400-7

Hmm, why do I know this word "perovskite". Wikipedia gives me no clues, just some mineral.

Possible source: Solar panels with this material were hyped a couple years ago.

Ah, that's what it was for me.

Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39998740

Perovskite solar cells, ah yes, the ones that degrade rapidly in sunlight. Good thing they are typically safely tucked away in labs with controlled lighting.

Idk what you're trying to say. Every technology starts in a lab. Perhaps the degradation problem is solvable?

It’s just a mindless comment by someone who doesn’t keep up with the latest developments. Perovskites already entered small scale commercial production last year and are being deployed in the field to validate how well they hold up in real-world conditions, so it seems we’re only one step away from large-scale deployment.

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2024/tc/d4tc0208...

IIRC it was some different type of imaging sensor, so looked it up that way

They are used in thin-film solar panel development. Not sure anyone has cracked the big problem with them, which is durability.

You may have a Perovskia growing in the garden also. The brothers left their print.

Where are the pictures?

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