Between the bright cap of the enamel and the pale crest of the bone runs a soft dark band along the neck of many teeth. It can look, unmistakably, like decay eating into the root. Often it is nothing of the kind — it is...
A digital dental sensor does not, in most cases, feel the X-ray at all. It watches a thin crystalline screen flash with light and reads that instead. The material of that screen — whether a forest of light-piping cesium iodide needles or a settled bed...
Every X-ray beam leaves the tube already uneven — brighter toward the cathode, dimmer toward the anode. The anode heel effect is the quiet gradient built into the physics of the source itself, and it shades the density of an image before the anatomy is...