Besides offering much higher power levels, the bulk of most hospital X-ray equipment seems to just be positioning... i.e. the actual X-ray generator is fairly s

Besides offering much higher power levels, the bulk of most hospital X-ray equipment seems to just be positioning... i.e. the actual X-ray generator is fairly small (although things like a projected light illuminator to help the technician with aim make it bigger), but there's a lot of "accessory" equipment just to make it easy for the technician to position it in the right place and have it stay there. Ceiling tracks and a specially designed patient bed with a pretty x-ray transparent material that the sensor can be placed under, for example. Dental X-ray machines for example are very small, but I think it's because they operate at pretty low power and have pretty simple/consistent positioning requirements. Panoramic dental x-ray machines on the other hand are pretty big because of the specific positioning. On top of that I think a lot of hospitals just have pretty old X-ray machines... they're expensive and can operate for a long time with maintenance and tube replacements. I've seen clinics that upgraded their x-ray process to digital by using a standalone digital sensor like this, but are still using a 20+ year old analog machine as the x-ray source. I think that's why this particular sensor doesn't accept triggering information over the digital interface... that seems kind of weird at first glance, but I assume it was designed as a drop-in replacement for film, so it would be used with an older machine that didn't have any kind of digital trigger output. Instead it just detects when the exposure has started. Presumably the manual told the technician what parameters they needed to use on the emitter for it to get a full scan. The author here mentioned using a hand-held X-ray emitter for sports medicine which I'm curious about because I've never seen such a thing. I assume the power and exposure time must be pretty limited, even the dental X-ray machines have a regulatory requirement that the operator be behind a shield during use---although the implementation is usually pretty lax, just putting the exposure button in the hallway outside the x-ray nook so they have to step outside briefly.