Although X-rays have been around since the early 20th century, digital radiography has only been around since 1970. However, since then, digital radiography has been implemented in more and more large and small hospitals, imaging centers, and medical facilities and in many areas. of specialization. Popular imaging systems in use today include the CR and DR systems.

CR, or computed radiography, uses a phosphor imaging cassette to create digital images, and DR, or direct digital radiography, systems use a collection plate to capture images. DR systems are currently used as urgent care DR, veterinary DR, chiropractic DR, and podiatric DR units. These two systems, along with related hardware and software units such as DICOM digital format, PACS, and RIS, have brought many medical facilities into the modern age with state-of-the-art digital radiography capabilities.

Much of the early inventions and applications of medical digital radiography occurred around the same time that personal computers became more affordable and therefore more common. The first application of digital imaging was the invention of computed tomography, or computed tomography, in 1967, and it became a prototype in 1971. Its inventors, Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan McLeod Cormack, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their invention in 1979. Television technology also paralleled medical technological innovation with the shift from analog to digital capabilities.

MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, originated in the 1950s. The first research on the method was done in the 1970s, and it was finally licensed for use in humans in 1984.

In the 1990s, a change was made to digital radiography. It was discovered that X-ray images could be stored on phosphor screens, and this formed the basis for today’s CR imaging systems.

Complementary PACS systems debuted in 1982, although the idea was conceived more than twenty years earlier. When the Internet became world news in the mid-1980s, it also had a huge impact on digital radiography. Today’s digital medical images that are saved in the DICOM image format, similar to the common JPEG format, can be stored on a server for archival purposes, viewed on a personal computer equipped with PACS software and a diagnostic monitor that makes it a clinical workstation, and can be sent and received via the World Wide Web.

In the past decade, as the price of personal computers and other electronic devices has dropped significantly, so has the profitability of digital medical imaging, making digital radiography an affordable and modern alternative from its humble beginnings in X- ray systems