Technology is freakin’ amazing.
Thanks to some lower back pain, I got a hands-on experience with digital radiography today. For five bucks — that’s five US dollars — they gave me a CD with the Dicom image files to take home.
Am I going to share those images? Converted to JPEG format on this very website? You bet I am, after the jump.
Check it out: that’s my actual innards. (It’s not a HIPAA violation if the data is your own.) Click once for a bigger image, then click that bigger image again for the 1MB+ original resolution image (3520×4280).
The actual process was pretty unexciting. They had me lie down on a big white table, and positioned what looked like a regular old X-ray emitter above me. Take a deep breath, click and done. Hey presto, big high-res images.
This isn’t actually my first experience with DX; my dentist has been taking digital dental X-rays for years now. But this is my first experience with the big-format stuff.
Any of you amateur radiographers out there think you see something exciting, drop me a comment or an email. Original Dicom files on request, if you have a reason to want them.
Update: The WordPress “gallery” feature was created by a malign alien intelligence that’s nourished by human suffering. So, enjoy some inline thumbnails you can just click to get the bigger image. Also, for comparison, here are some more recent X-ray images taken on conventional film then later digitized:
