SHRINKING THE X-RAY MACHINE
Forget room-sized machines… modern bone imagers have gotten much smaller
WORDS IAN EVENDEN
A dvertisements in the back of comic books used to offer all-seeing X-ray glasses, guaranteed to let you look beneath the skin, or possibly just the clothes, of people around you. Bafflingly, they never worked, and genuine medical X-rays have been – since Wilhelm Röntgen discovered their use in 1895, bagging a Nobel Prize in Physics in the process – confined to large pieces of equipment taking up whole rooms in hospitals. All that, however, has been changing over the last decade.
A development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has seen an X-ray machine shrunk down to the size of a shoebox. The images it takes are superior to those from traditional X-ray machines, too, with increased detail and the ability to image soft tissues – something the old technology could only hope to do with the aid of potentially troublesome contrast-enhancing agents such as barium or iodine.