MRI Scanner: Exploratory Surgery

MRI SCANNER

Before the MRI was Invented

Before the MRI scanner was invented, other machines and methods were used. Exploratory surgery was extremely common up until the 1970's. Exploratory surgery is still used today if the new methods of imaging fail to give a diagnosis. It is an invasive operation that requires an incision so that doctors can examine the effected area. For more than a hundred years, doctors have used the x-ray machine to see inside of the body. When the x-ray was first invented in 1895, it was a huge breakthrough, but it also has many limitations. The x-ray was discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen a German physicist and doctors around the world began to use them by January 1896. The x-ray can't see the soft tissues because they're two dimensional. Organs that are the same density look the same and it is harder to tell the difference.

In 1946 Edward Purcell and Felix Bloch discovered the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and won the Nobel Prize in 1952 for their invention. This underpins the MRI scanner and has a similar concept. When …show more content…
It was first used for clinical purposes in 1956. To make an image of a person's internal body structures, the ultrasound uses high-frequency waves. The most common use for the ultrasound nowadays, is to take an image of an unborn baby inside of the womb and to monitor their growth. Other uses for the ultrasound are to take images of people muscles and tendons. The ultrasound has limitations and is not the ideal imaging technique for air-filled bowel or organs obscured by the bowel because the ultrasound waves are distributed by air or gas. Large patients are also more difficult to image using an ultrasound because there are greater amounts of tissue that weaken the sound waves as they pass deeper into the body. The machines and methods of imaging that were introduced in later years, are much more advanced and have less

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