Title is self explanatory.
In: Technology
So when an x-ray, as in the actual energy wave, enters you, it only bounces back when something super dense hits it, like a bone, which will reflect almost all of the x-ray. The film of the xray machine picks up the the reflected ray and develops it into an image (very similar to how normal camera film uses visible light to make an image on film). This is how an xray film is made. Once developed, the film shows every place that was too dense for the xray to penetrate.
Sometimes things other than bones can reflect the xray back. If there is a lot of fluid in the lungs, this can cause the xray to be reflected back. Fluid in the lungs is a sign of infection. Technically, the xray did not prove that the patient is infected. If the patient recently inhaled water, that would be a whole other story. But, if they have a persistent cough, the water in the lungs would confirm there is a serious infections (and where the infection is).
I know it’s nitpicking, but in all technicality, an xray doesn’t diagnose infection in itself. It is a piece of the puzzle.
NAD but I believe the only X-ray that can show any form of infection is a chest X-ray. Typically a chest extra captures your lungs when clear vs if you have fluid in your lungs or pneumonia you will see what are called infiltrates or darker areas on film in patterns suggesting infection. They can also pick up granulomas which are from tuberculosis lung infections.
Otherwise standard x-rays can’t show any other type of infection to my knowledge.
An x-ray won’t necessarily show you an infection, but it’ll show you your bones. This is because x-rays are a type of high frequency light (high-energy electromagnetic radiation) that penetrate the skin and muscle, but not the bone. Everything you see is a result of light bouncing off an object and into your eyes. X-rays are able to go through your body and bounce off your bones, and so we can get images of breaks, fractures, etc.
A couple of things I’d like to clear up. I’m a radiographer so I have a 4 year honours degree in this and I X-Ray patients pretty much every day.
Some of the information in one of the replies is almost there, but not quite. Firstly, x-rays are photons, not electrons. Secondly, the image from an x-ray isn’t the detector/receptor/imaging plate/film picking up what is reflected, but what passes through. On a standard x-ray, the blacker something, the more of the x-rays made it through the patient to the detector. The denser something is, the more it blocks the x-rays, the whiter that area is on the final image.
A chest infection would normally show as areas being denser/whiter due to fluid, but there are other things which can also appear similar to the untrained eye (but noticeable to experienced individuals), such as fibrosis, calcifications, other fluid (if you aspirate), so radiologists and other doctors tend to use experience and patient history to determine which it is most likely to be.
With dental x-rays, infections tend to create small (or if left too long, large) fluid filled abscesses, which tend to show as less dense than the healthy areas around them.
The long and the short is that areas of infection normally have different densities to the areas around them or look different from healthy areas.
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