Attenuation - Video Lesson

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. This lesson is about attenuation. When an x-ray beam passes through matter, like through a patient, there are three things that can happen. Some photons are transmitted all the way through the patient. We just call that transmission. Some photons are absorbed in the patient. So we call that absorption. And some photons interact with the body and are scattered out of the beam. So we call that scattering. Absorption and scatter, remove photons from the X-ray beam. And that's what we call attenuation. Attenuation is specifically defined as a reduction in the x-ray beam intensity, as a result of absorption and scatter in matter. To understand attenuation, we really have to understand intensity. Remember that intensity refers to the number of x-ray photons. Before passing through matter, the x-ray