Patients will soon be relieved from the inconvenience of complicated medical procedures with the development of a new way of creating Terahertz (Hz) or T-rays, a type of radiation that promises to revolutionize medical scanning.

According to scientists from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), a research institute of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore and Imperial College London in the UK, the new continuous wave T-rays are more efficient and could be used to make better medical scanning gadgets.

This may even lead to innovations similar to the 'tricorder' scanner used in Star Trek, the researchers said.

T-rays are waves in the far infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum that have a wavelength hundreds of times longer than visible light. These are being used in airport security scanners, prototype medical scanning devices and in spectroscopy systems for materials analysis as it can sense molecules such as those present in cancerous tumours and living DNA.

The newly developed T-rays, which are made into stronger directional beam, promises to make medical scanning faster and more convenient, and more accurate results. This breakthrough also allows future T-rays systems to be more portable, easier to operate, and cheaper.

T-rays can also be used to detect explosives or drugs, in gas pollution monitoring or non-destructive testing of semiconductor integrated circuit chips.

According to the study lead author Dr Jing Hua Teng, the secret behind the innovation lies in the new nano-antenna that they have developed and integrated into the semiconductor chip. These nano-antennas create much stronger THz fields that generate a power output that is 100 times higher than the power output of commonly used THz sources that have conventional interdigitated antenna structures.

A stronger T-ray source renders the T-ray imaging devices more powerful and with higher resolution, Dr. Hua Teng said.

"Thanks to modern nanotechnology and nanofabrication, we have made a real breakthrough in the generation of T-rays that takes us a step closer to these new scanning devices. With the introduction of a gap of only 0.1 micrometers into the electrodes, we have been able to make amplified waves at the key wavelength of 1000 micrometers that can be used in such real world applications," research co-author Stefan Maier, a Visiting Scientist at A*STAR's IMRE and Professor in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, said.

The study was published recently in Nature Photonics.