Perspective, passion, a ferry and giving back time with X-ray test equipment

We are excited to be doing a series of open letters from the RaySafe Research and Development, and Engineering teams. They are the brains behind radiation measurement product development and offer a unique perspective. We started the series with a blog from Johan Hogner and are now pleased to share one from Fredrik Oskarson. Like Johan’s blog, Fredrik’s is based on an interview in which he shares his thoughts.

About Fredrik

Fredrik Oskarson is a RaySafe Product Development Engineer with an MSc in Engineering Physics. We discussed his role of designing sensor physics and measurement algorithms for the RaySafe X2. Pretty weighty stuff that he kindly kept at a relatively non-technical level for this marketing interviewer.

Personally, Fredrik lives outside of Gothenburg, Sweden on a small island, giving him the romantic commute of a ferry and a bicycle. It also gives him innovation time.

According to him, Fredrik’s job gives him the privilege of designing instruments and algorithms that have an impact on many people. This inspires him to try to make things that “just work”. He also relishes the friendly, positive competition with his teammates of seeing who can help the customer the most through their innovations, with only the best solutions making it into the X-ray QA test tool.

About the Products

Fredrik was actively involved in the development of the X2 radiation measurement device and X2 sensors. His number one goal when working on the product was to design the algorithms and sensors so they could measure anything without making settings, because customer research showed the two biggest pain points with X-ray QA test equipment are:

• Inconsistent or unexpected measurements caused by instruments with bad settings that are too complicated to understand.
• Too much to do, too little time.

A big part of the development process was defining a family of sensors that would be able to characterize every needed aspect on any diagnostic X-ray machine. One single kit should make it easy for professionals to optimize the image quality while ensuring radiation safety for patients – giving doctors the foundation for the best possible care.

• The R/F sensor is the most commonly used sensor. It covers all radiography and fluoroscopy applications. Unlike other R/F sensors, it spans all the way from the lowest fluoroscopy dose rates to short exposures at the highest radiography rates, without extra hardware, measurement modes or settings. To achieve this the electronics adapt to signal levels that span almost 13 orders of magnitude, in less than a millisecond.
• The MAM sensor is a truly unique star, as it measures dose and HVL on all mammography beam qualities on the market, e.g. Mo/Mo or W/Rh, without corrections and without having to select a beam quality. It also inherently handles all types of mixed beam quality sequences, used during contrast-enhanced imaging or advanced 3D techniques such as tomosynthesis.
• The Light sensor was born on an “Innovation Day” together with experts at a leading original equipment manufacturer (OEM). This resulted in a sensor that measures light from monitors using a small aperture angle with stellar low-light performance. It also measures ambient light in the full range from “moonlight to sunlight”.

Fredrik had so many interesting stories about the research, customer ghosting to look and learn, experimentation, and the passion it took to help develop the X2 that we could go on forever. Instead, look at the RaySafe X2 radiation measurement device to see the results of Fredrik and the team’s work. Also look for more blogs about the faces behind the products. They, like the products, are impressive!

Learn more about the X2 X-ray test device now.