I work at a hospital. I saw a technician doing a chest x ray the other day. He placed the x ray machine at least 5 feet about the patients chest. Wouldn’t this cause the radiation to scatter? How does it only put the lungs in focus then?
In: Engineering
X-rays are high enough energy that they don’t really scatter or refract at that scale. The upside of this is that you can see through bodies, downside is that you have very few ways to shape the beam. Taking an x-ray image is essentially casting a shadow that you want to be as close to the real object as possible, which means you want the rays to be as parallel as possible.
If you were trying to cast an accurate shadow of your hand on the wall using only a light bulb (no lenses or mirrors), the bulb would have to be pretty far away to not distort the size and shape.
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