Waterloo, Ont. company’s tech responsible for first X-ray image taken in space

A Waterloo, Ont. company says it has captured the first ever X-ray image in space. CTV’s Spencer Turcotte takes a look.

A Waterloo, Ont. company is celebrating a world’s first on a mission that saw four space tourists orbit the north and south poles earlier this month.

A spacecraft blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre last week to take part in the Fram2 mission that had two main goals.

One was to become the first crew to capture Earth’s polar regions from low-Earth orbit.

The second was to develop advancements for long-range space exploration.

The crew completed a total of 22 experiments during a three-and-a-half day span. At least one of those experiments made history.

“Taking X-rays for the first time ever up in space,” said Amol Karnick, president and CEO of Waterloo-based KA Imaging.

His team built the world’s first multi-layer spectral X-ray detector.

“It allows you to see the soft tissue independently of the bone image,” said Karnick.

Thanks to Karnick, along with his co-founder Karim Karim, who is also a professor at the University of Waterloo, their technology did the unimaginable.

“Seeing the image was groundbreaking. Well, it was actually in space. So, maybe call it spacebreaking,” Karnick said, smiling.

The image mimics the first-ever X-ray image taken on Earth over a century ago by Wilhelm Roentgen.

Crew members aboard the space flight weren’t X-ray technicians, so Karnick and others taught them how to use the equipment before the flight. The gear also included a portable X-ray generator.

The SpaceXray project happened on a SpaceX capsule, but it wasn’t their mission or funded by them. The three-and-a-half day trip of the SpaceX Dragon capsule was chartered by Bitcoin investor Chun Wang.

Still, it didn’t stop the SpaceX team from being impressed by it during a pre-launch broadcast.

“This machine can also help us measure astronauts’ bone density so we can actually keep track of how they’re doing in that respect,” said Marissa Rosenberg, senior medical research engineer for SpaceX, during the pre-launch panel.

Karnick said this advancement is key because astronauts can lose anywhere from three to four per cent of their bone density per month.

“Think about the longer voyages to Mars [and] the astronauts or people spending time on the International Space Station,” said Karnick, referring to the toll on space travellers’ bodies.

Given that physical space is actually limited up in space and on the spacecrafts, the KA Imaging team says they’ve solved that problem too.

“We made the effort to take effectively three times the amount of extra hardware everyone else does and made it fit in the same space,” said Karnick.

The device can also help inspect machines aboard spacecrafts to assess what repairs may be needed.

“If we have a machine that’s malfunctioning, instead of having to take it apart and figure out what’s wrong, we can just take an X-ray of it to diagnose the problems,” said Karnick.

It’s an out-of-this-world achievement that can make life better on Earth too – especially in remote areas.

“They don’t have access to a lot of advanced imaging,” said Karnick, whose team helped implement their device at hospitals in Kenya. “Having a better X-ray system out there will help them find diseases earlier.”

That work is being done locally too. KA Imaging is working with Grand River Hospital and they did a trial within the intensive care unit. By reducing the amount of space the X-ray system needed to operate, fewer patients had to be transferred outside the unit for diagnostic services.

That way, immunocompromised patients were less susceptible to catching other illnesses since they did not have to move among units for imaging.

While this major achievement on the Fram2 mission may just seem like an X-ray of a hand, it points to much more – capturing the unseen while exploring the unknown.