Title is self explanatory.
In: Technology
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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