Customs officers get X-ray machines for down under searches

Choose 3 days in a cell

It will seriously clog them up.

Refuse permission for any type of x-ray.

X ray equipment is fragile and expensive, and to get a good cat scan you need to stay still.

They cannot physically force you to have a scan.

When shifting through your shit for 3 days or so:

They have to have guards.

They have limited cell space.

They have to feed you.

They have to do paperwork.

You can FOI the paperwork (more headaches)

You can threaten to sue for any abuses of your human rights.

Yoiu can ask for lawyers to be present during your interviews.

You can cause trouble (perhaps damage the special toilet; must be expensive)

You *do* need a radiographer... And more...

You also need presumably a doctor to order the scan unless that has also been circumvented and I am not aware it has. Remember, this is not usually a scan initiated for medical indications. What you are also not aware of is as far as I recall is consent is also needed. And then you need another doctor (a radiologist) trained in the interpretation of said pictures to 'report' on the images (ie interpret them).

One other thing that is not obvious from the article : you need to know is that it's not plain x-rays we're talking about...

the investigation of choice is a CT which would typically involve a higher effective dose of radiation than plain x-ray films.

So yes, to answer your question, more specifically, you need a radiographer, but not just any, you need a CT trained radiographer to acquire the images.

So, while the radiation dose of the CT involved in these sort of scans is somewhat lower than that of many other abdominal CT scans for other indications, and does not involve contrast, it is still far from insignificant.

Remember the manner in which the images were acquired on the scanner would also have been done apropros to the indication. Also, the radiologist who looks at the scan may be tempted just to answer the specified question in mind, ie looking for gut intraluminal foreign bodies. And that approach is not necessarily wrong.

So it's not like 'one scan will tell us everything' - that is a fallacious assumption that even to this day exists in quite a number of doctors who haven't a clue about medical imaging.

This so, the argument for such scans in that you will find an unknown undetected medical problem should be discounted because this is definitely far from certainty. You will see a suspicious lesion if it is picked up on scan AND staring you in the face AND you see it, but you won't see it if it is small and/or not acquired because of technical issues ie the manner of image acquisition and you are not actively looking for it (and in this case you are NOT). Trust me on this one.

Unfortunately, short of waiting for suspects to poop the stuff out, this is possibly the only practical way I can think of reliably finding foreign bodies within the gut lumen.

Ultrasound is practically inappropriate because of a host of reasons and magnetic resonance has its risks with the magnet (one is looking for a foreign body which is hopefully not ferromagnetic, but then... who knows.. staples on packets within the condoms perhaps etc people do silly things) plus is often not easily available at all. For now, that leaves us with x-rays.

TL:DR : I believe you still need a substantial medial/radiological presence or input otherwise this is inappropriate, it involves a non-trivial dose of radiation, it's not a magic wonder scan and I believe you still need consent (which is probably the most important message here).