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You're kidding, right?

The balloon would float and not stay in contact with the belt.

the charitable interpretation of this question is “Why wasn’t the balloon tied to something that could move through the conveyor belt?”.

Which is a much more reasonable thing to ask.

Although I was very tired when I originally posted this around 2:30 AM, I think my train of thought was that if they got it from outside of the machine in the conveyor belt --> inside of the machine in the conveyor belt --> it's the same mechanism which will get it to pop out of the other end.

But I suppose I was giving too much benefit of the doubt :)

The balloon floats and will not touch the conveyor belt?

Hey thanks for the answer. I can be too literal, so at the time I wasn't sure if that's what he was implying, or if there was some other special property about helium in a balloon in an X-ray machine that I didn't know of.