Method of forming radiation images and silver halide photographic

Abstract

A novel method of forming radiation images, especially X-ray images of bones and gastric areas for medical examination, is disclosed. The method comprises the steps of exposing a radiation image-forming system to radiation, the radiation image-forming system comprising a silver halide photographic material having at least one light-sensitive silver halide emulsion layer on each side of a transparent support and two radiation-intensifying screens respectively arranged on the front and the back sides of the photographic material, the photographic material having a crossover rate of at most 15% with respect to the light emitted from the intensifying screens; and developing the exposed photographic material to form a radiation image, wherein the developed photographic material has a characteristic curve such that when drawn using crossed coordinates equal to each other in unit length, with diffusion density as ordinate (Y-axis) and common logarithm of exposure amount as abscissa (X-axis), the characteristic curve provides a point gamma value ranging from 1.8 to 3.0 at every point within the optical density range of 0.7 to 1.5 and a point gamma value ranging from 1.2 to 2.0 at every point within the optical density range of 2.0 to 2.8. The X-ray images formed by the method have a good balance between the image quality and the sensitivity.