RE: e-mailing x-rays

January 30, 2004

Can any of you share your experiences of how to get an x-ray on to your computer

and/or e-mail it to Dr. Smet?

Some have taped their x-rays to a window or sliding glass door. I have mine

done digitally that way. Look carefully at the background though. I now have

pine trees growing out of my hips, and I remember someone that backlit theirs

and now appears to have sat on a light bulb-LOL.

Cindy

C+ 5/25/01 and 6/28/01

January 31, 2004

Hi ! Glad to hear you are doing well! I still remember Dr De Smet calling

you by your last name when I was there after you! He just couldn't get that

straight! It is remarkable that he remembers us so well.........

Jude

emailing x-rays

I don't know if this will be a help to anyone but I found that

emailing x-rays was a great way to quickly get xrays to those Dr's

that will look at an emailed x-ray (not all will). They are not a

substitute for the actual films but they can give a doctor an idea

of whether or not a person is a candidate for a resurfacing. I

think that many dr's can give you a digital copy of your xrays but

when I called the x-ray dept of my US ortho, I was told that they

didn't have that capability so I did the digitizing myself in the

following way:

1. Get your monitor screen to display a white area over as much of

it's surface as possible. I used a drawing program set to display a

full screen of white with no title bars or anything else. Notepad

will work also but you lose the top part because of the menu and

title bars.

2. Tape your xray to the screen of your monitor. The larger the

monitor the better since you want the film to be as flat as

possible. Mine is a 17 inch monitor.

3. I don't know if this helps the dr or not but I taped a

millimeter scale to a non-critical part of the front of the xray

film so dimensions of the original film could be determined

approximately from the digital image.

4. Set up a digital camera on a tripod a few feet away from the

screen. Books/boxes and other things under the camera would work if

you dont have a tripod. You need to keep the camera still since no

flash is used.

5. Zoom the camera so that the xray fills up the frame. Check the

focus in the display if you can. Make sure the flash is not going to

operate since this puts glare on the pic.

6. Try to eliminate any reflections on the backlit x-ray film

coming from windows or lights. I did this by closing curtains and

shielding the screen from reflections with

magazines/newspapers/pillows etc. that I (and my wife) held by hand

during the actual photograph.

7. Shoot the picture with the timer or a remote so you don't jar

the camera while the shutter is open.

8. Download the photos to your computer and check for focus and

absence of any glare areas that you forgot to shield from the screen.

9. Use a photo editing program if you want to put date/name or other

info on the pic. You can also crop out areas that are not on the

actual x-ray.

10. Save the digitized x-ray file as a jpeg file with as much

resolution as possible. I saved mine so that the final file size

was about 150k bytes.

I had to play around with this process alittle but I ended up with

pretty good quality images that I was able to send to Dr De Smet for

his evaluation. When I sent him the actual films a couple of weeks

later he said that the films did not show him anything that the

digitized photos didn't show. Of course, if my local OS could have

given me a digital x-ray, I would have gone that route instead. I

was desperate and in a hurry at the time....the hip was really

hurting alot back then.

January 31, 2004