I am old enough to have read of those and other advances in image analysis in Scientific American and elsewhere and to have studied their fruits in Art History in college.
The reason that the Wall Street Journal has written a story about the new imaging technology is that its cost and capability permit wide scale application to ancient manuscripts, often in remote locations. That has revolutionary consequences, just as the modern PC and jet airliners have revolutionary consequences that far eclipse their technological antecedents.
If those are your sources, then it's understandable that you don't have all of the facts. Try the actual technical journals in chemical analysis (which is where ALL these techniques originated). I'm old enough that I watched the birth of these technologies, long before they ever made their way to Scientific American. Yeah, they're smaller and more powerful today, but that was and is inevitable as technology improves. What matters is the initial discovery/invention. I suspect that the Wall Street Journal reporters are equally as ignorant of the lineage of these items.
But if the Obama administration gets their way with "national health care", you can kiss any future such developments good-bye, because the typical development route of all these methods has been 1)physics, 2)chemical analysis, 3) medical analysis, 4) "ancillary applications" (like art). Stage 3 is where the big bucks get infused that make the methods sufficiently automated that they can be used by non-professionally trained operators.
I agree. This is exciting stuff.