Experimental study of a real-time corona discharge imaging system as a future biomedical imaging device

In the paper, a preliminary real-time corona discharge imaging system is introduced, and the effects of the imaging parameters, such as electric field intensities and their frequencies, on the resulting images are investigated. From experiments using metal phantoms and plant leaves, it is found that no insulators can be captured by the corona discharge, and the effect of imaging parameters on the image quality is clearly demonstrated. For the future application of this real-time corona discharge imaging system, a composite phantom made of four different metal substances is investigated, along with the various combinations of imaging parameters, and the corona discharge images of a fresh plant leaf are captured as a test version of biomedical objects. The ionisation current, which is important in biomedical applications, is measured in each imaging procedure and estimated by curve-fitting the measured values to the previously known theory of ionisation.