Question: What forms of tests do you proceed to perform on the x-ray machines and scanners?

David Mills answered on 19 Jun 2018:

If you’re asking how do we test the scanners work, then it’s a combination of measuring and scanning things we already know and checking we get the same answer with the new machines.

If you want to know what we do with the scanners once they are built and working then there are several types of experiments we do.
1) the standard day-to-day work is scanning extracted teeth, to check them for suitability for use in other experiments. We have lots of students in the dental school researching new treatments, filling materials and toothpastes. They need to know what the tooth was like before they started their experiments.

2) Other scanning, for specific projects. It might be looking at bones, rat jaws or lizard skulls. Various people at the university use our scanners to help their research.

3) Heritage scans, this is my favourite. We are probably the only place on the planet that can see the ink in old scrolls and documents and read them without opening them. We do one of these every few months. They scans take days to weeks, so we cant fit many of them in.

Hope this helps.