Abstract
Recently physiological roles of trace elements in the human body in relation to intoxication and deficiency have attracted much attention from investigators in medicine and biology. Particle indeced X-ray emission (PIXE) analysis has high sensitivity for determination of trace elements in biological and makes it possible to observe the distributions of trace elements in a small sample simultaneously and non-destructively. In this paper, application of the PIXE method to investigate the relation between the elemental distribution and the histological structure of the tissues is described. And various concerning diseace-induced changes of trace element concentration in tissues are introduced.
