How can x rays be detected

Your doctor will have ordered that X-rays be taken of a certain area of your body so they can evaluate a particular health issue. This is the most commonly used form of imaging for diagnostic purposes. An X-ray can detect broken bones, tumors, and even an object that is lodged inside the body. Radiologists and technicians have found the strangest objects inside human bodies.

Any part of the body can get an X-ray: head, chest, abdomen, arms, hands, legs, and feet. Your X-rays will allow your doctor to identify any irregularities that may be causing your symptoms. Your doctor will order an X-ray to examine areas of pain, trauma, or disease. Some examples of things that can be detected by an X-ray include:.

When studying your X-ray scans , your doctor will consider many things — which can include your symptoms, age, weight, and possibly also your family history. The procedure of getting an X-ray is quick and painless. There are no special instructions for patients and no preparation , other than having to remove metal jewelry beforehand. The technician will position you for the X-ray, such as standing up for a lung image or lying down for an apparent broken leg.

They will also place very thick fabric-based lead shields in one or more areas so that those areas are not captured in the X-ray picture. This is how a proportional counter detector gets it's name.

The signal at the electrodes gives astronomers the energy of the incoming X-ray. In order to get position information, proportional counters generally have a large number of electrodes, dividing the detector up into small cells. Then, the ion pair will be attracted to the closest electrodes, and astronomers know which cell the X-ray entered. The Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer is a recent X-ray astronomy mission that has used proportional counter detectors.

The HRC uses microchannel plates to detect X-rays. A microchannel plate detector consists of an array of tiny channels etched through a lead glass plate.

Each channel is basically a tube that runs through the plate. The tubes are coated with a material that causes electrons to be emitted when X-rays strike it. Those electrons are accelerated down the tube by a high voltage. As they travel down the tube, they strike the tube, causing more electrons to be emitted. A typical microchannel plate has bout 10,, closely packed channels. Those channels each have a diameter of about 10 microns. The position of the incoming X-ray can be found by pinpointing which channel the X-ray activated.

Semiconductor detectors work in a similar manner to proportional counters, except instead of being filled with a gas, they use a solid semiconducting material. When an X-ray enters the detector, it interacts with the semiconductor.

This association is accurate because an x-ray can produce a picture of any bone in the body using a small dose of ionizing radiation. The images an x-ray produces are commonly used to diagnose and locate both broken bones and fractures. Whether the injury is a compound break or just a thin crack along the bone, an x-ray is most often the fastest and easiest way for a doctor to pinpoint the location and assess the type of break.

Once the injury has been diagnosed, an x-ray may still be used following treatment of the break to assess whether the bone fragments are healing properly, stabilized and aligned appropriately.

On the other hand, an x-ray image could show that a suspected bone fracture is not broken at all. An x-ray of a joint can reveal whether or not the joint is dislocated or damaged in another way.

A dislocation injury leads to a loss of anatomical congruence of the bones at a joint, which can cause pain, swelling and immobility of the joint. This separation of two usually adjacent bone parts makes it difficult for a joint to function regularly. A joint dislocation is described by the position of the bone farther from the center of the body distal bone compared with the location of the closer bone proximal bone.

This means the distal bone can dislocate from the proximal bone, but the proximal bone cannot dislocate from the distal bone. For example, the upper arm bone humerus can dislocate from the collarbone clavicle , but the collarbone cannot dislocate from the arm bone. If an x-ray indicates that a joint may be dislocated, a doctor will most likely order a magnetic resonance imaging MRI scan to better assess the soft tissue structures around the dislocated joint.

An x-ray produces a clear picture of growth plates because a growth plate is softer than bone and contains fewer minerals, which makes them appear darker on the x-ray image and easy to recognize.

A fractured growth plate can result in pain, swelling and tenderness as well as an inability to move the affected area. Along with growth plate damage, an x-ray can show other bone growth problems like bone spurs. Depending on where the bone spurs are located, they may cause no symptoms and not require treatment or cause extreme swelling and difficulty moving.