Almustaqbal University College

Lecture Four
Sarah Mohammed
Second stage
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Theoretical Lecture
KVp adjustment & mA control

KVp Adjustment

Kilovoltage peak (kVp) the kilovoltage applied to the x-ray tube, which
accelerates electrons from the cathode to the anode. Tube voltage,
determines the quantity (intensity) and quality (energy) of the photons
generated.

An increase in kVp extends and intensifies the x-ray emission spectrum,

such that the maximal and average/effective energies are higher and the
photon number/intensity is higher.

The energy of the photon emitted from the X-ray tube depends on the
energy of the electrons that bombard the target. The energy of the
electron is, in turn, determined by the peak kilovoltage used.

As the applied voltage increases, the effective photon energy also

increases. The maximum photon energy is proportional to the peak value
of the applied voltage. In addition, the X-ray production efficiency is
related with applied voltage. The intensity increases with increase of
applied voltage (Figure1). The amount of radiation produced increases as
the square of the kilo voltage,

Radiation exposure (kVp)2

Thus, increase in kVp increases the quality, quantity and efficiency of X-

ray production.

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Almustaqbal University College
Lecture Four
Sarah Mohammed
Second stage
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Figure1: effect of kilovoltage (Kvp) on x-ray spectra.

Image quality

The considerations that should be taken to adjust the voltage:

 The first consideration when selecting the kVp is ensuring

adequate penetration and exposure, which depends on photon
number, photon energy, and tissue attenuation (which depends
on attenuation coefficient and thickness).
There must be an adequate number of sufficiently energetic
photons that penetrate the patient and reach the image receptor.
Exposure at the image receptor increases approximately by the fifth
power of the change in kVp (due to a combination of increased
photon number and penetrability), such that a 15% increase in kVp
doubles the intensity at the detector.
 The next consideration for adjusting kVp is image contrast (figure
2). kVp, has a great effect on image contrast. A lower kVp will
make the x-ray beam less penetrating , this result in a greater
difference in attenuation between the different parts of the subject,
leading to higher contrast.

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Almustaqbal University College
Lecture Four
Sarah Mohammed
Second stage
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 A higher kVp will make X-ray beam more penetrating, this will
result in less difference in attenuation between the different parts of
the image, leading to lower contrast.

Figure 2: KVp and image contrast.

 To conclude; high KVp means higher energy photons are more

likely to travel through the patient without any tissue interaction.
Consequently, higher energy x-ray beams generate images with
poorer contrast.

Tube Current (mA)

The number of X-rays produced depends on the number of electrons that

strike the target of the X-ray tube. The number of electrons depends
directly on the tube current (mA) used. Greater the mA, higher the
electrons that are produced, and hence, more X-rays will be obtained.

The tube current affects only the intensity (quantity) but not the quality of
the X-rays (figure 3). As the tube current increases the intensity also
increases.

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Almustaqbal University College
Lecture Four
Sarah Mohammed
Second stage
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The intensity is mA.

Increase of applied voltage is compensated by the reduction of tube

current, which is required to maintain same exposure.

Figure3: effect of tube current (mA) on x-ray spectra.

Milliampere-seconds (mAs)

Milliampere-seconds more commonly known as mAs is a measure of

radiation produced (milliamperage) over a set amount of time (seconds)
via an x-ray tube. It directly influences the radiographic density, when all
other factors are constant.

The time factor (s) is a measure of the electrons production duration in

the tube; meaning prescribes how long mA will last.

For example:

mA x t = mAs
600 mA x 0.1 sec. = 60 mAs

Increasing either the current or time will increase the quantity of

radiation; therefore the amount of radiation in an examination is
represented as mAs.

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Almustaqbal University College
Lecture Four
Sarah Mohammed
Second stage
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Exposure Timer & checking a timer

Exposure Timers

The exposure timers control the length of an X-ray exposure. There are
two basic types of exposure timers, namely, electronic timers, and
automatic exposure control (AEC).

1- Electronic Timers
In electronic timer, the length of the X-ray exposure is determined by the
time required to charge a capacitor through a resistance. When the
exposure button starts exposure, it also starts charging a capacitor. The
exposure time is terminated, when the capacitor is charged to a specified
value, necessary to turn on associated electronic circuit. This time can be
varied by varying the value of the resistance in the charging circuit.
Modern generators use electronic timers, in order to obtain very accurate
exposure duration. These timers can accurately control exposures from <
1 ms to > 1 s.

Figure 4: simplified circuitry of an electronic timer.

2- Automatic Exposure Control (AEC)

a. Phototimers
Phototimers use a fluorescent (light-producing) screen and a device that
converts the light to electricity. A photomultiplier (PM) tube is an
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Almustaqbal University College
Lecture Four
Sarah Mohammed
Second stage
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electronic device that converts visible light energy into electrical energy.
A photodiode is a solid-state device that performs the same function.
Phototimer AEC devices are considered exit-type devices because the
detectors are positioned behind the image receptor (Figure 2) so that
radiation must exit the image receptor before it is measured by the
detectors.

Figure 5: Phototimer Automatic Exposure Control. In the phototimer automatic

exposure control system, the detectors are located directly below the image receptor.
This is an exit-type device in that the x-rays must exit the image receptor before they
are measured by the detectors.

Light paddles, coated with a fluorescent material, serve as the detectors,

and the radiation interacts with the paddles, producing visible light. This
light is transmitted to remote PM tubes or photodiodes that convert this
light into electricity. The timer is tripped and the radiographic exposure is
terminated when a sufficiently large charge has been received. This
electrical charge is in proportion to the radiation to which the light

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Almustaqbal University College
Lecture Four
Sarah Mohammed
Second stage
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

paddles have been exposed. Photo timers have largely been replaced with
ionization chamber systems.

b. Ionization Chamber Systems

An ionization or ion chamber is a hollow cell that contains air and is
connected to the timer circuit via an electrical wire figure 3.

Figure 6: schematic of ionization chamber.

Ionization-chamber AEC devices are considered entrance-type devices

because the detectors are positioned in front of the image receptor (Figure
4) so that radiation interacts with the detectors just before interacting with
the image receptor. When the ionization chamber is exposed to radiation
from a radiographic exposure, the air inside the chamber becomes
ionized, creating an electrical charge. This charge travels along the wire
to the timer circuit. The timer is tripped and the radiographic exposure is
terminated when a sufficiently large charge has been received. This
electrical charge is in proportion to the radiation to which the ionization
chamber has been exposed. Compared with phototimers, ion chambers
are less sophisticated and less accurate, but they are less prone to failure.
Most of today’s AEC systems use ionization chambers.

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Almustaqbal University College
Lecture Four
Sarah Mohammed
Second stage
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Figure 7: Ionization Chamber Automatic Exposure Control. The ionization chamber

automatic exposure control system has the detectors located directly in front of the
image receptor. This is an entrance-type device because the x-ray exposure is
measured just before entering the image receptor.

Checking a timer:

If the exposure time set on the diagnostic x-ray unit is not optimal, the
radiograph can be under exposed or over exposed. This may lead to
repeat examinations. Hence, there is a need to test the timer of the x-ray
unit periodically.

Spinning Top Test Tool

 Spinning top test tool (figure 5) is used to check the exposure time.
 It consist of a rotating circular brass plate with small rectangular
portion cut (hole) at its periphery.
 The tool is placed on the cassette, loaded with film. For a set time,
the unit is energized, while the top is rotating.
 The pulses passing through the hole of the circular plate, produces
equally spaced rectangular density patterns, on the film.

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Almustaqbal University College
Lecture Four
Sarah Mohammed
Second stage
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Figure 8: spinning top test.

Questions:

1. Define KVp?
2. What are the consideration that should be taken to adjust the KVp?
3. How the KVp effect the contrast image?
4. What does the mAs mean?
5. What are the KVp and mA effect on?
6. How the electronic timers work?
7. What are the types of automatic exposure control (AEC)? Explain
on of them?
8. What is the entrance type device of AEC?
9. How can you checking the exposure time?