June 27, 2008

March of Technology

One of the things that the the Corps does very well is dentistry. Having a toothache or a dental infection is a bad thing in the field. So everyone gets a dental cleaning twice a year, and an exam annually.

The two events don't normally line up. It just so happened though, that I had a cleaning Thursday and my exam Friday, so the dentist was very impressed by my brushing habits, at least until she was told that I'd been at dental the day before.

What interested me most was my X-ray. They used the same X-ray projecting machine, but instead of film in my mouth, they had a sensor wrapped in disposable plastic, attached by a cable to a computer in the room with me. The projector hummed, and a digital X-ray appeared instantly on the computer. No developing. I shouldn't be surprised, though- we've got ubiquitous digital cameras, and there's no reason you can't make a image sensor sensitive to other wavelengths than visible light.

Not only was it faster, it had a major improvement in quality: instead of squinting at tiny little images, the dentist looked at a full-screen image on the computer in the exam room. A 17-inch screen is surely easier to read than a two-square-inch slide.

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