Medical Central: Different Medical Imaging Stuff

Read more on Medical Imaging. It covered some different stuff.

Different Medical Imaging Stuff
Lungs are hard to scan with MRI Scanners. Why? They're full of air, which can't react very well to the magnetic stuff. In the 1990's, a scientist figured out a way to fix this little problem. A patient breathes in a lungful of a certain gas... book says a special form of helium or xenon. This is highly reactive to MRI scans, about 100,000 times more so than water according to the book. The patient only holds it for the scans, which is about 10 seconds, according to the book. The book says that this technique is only in early research stages, and it not used in clinics or for medical purposes or by doctors.
Breast cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer caught by woman according to the book. Once women reach a certain age (50 years, according to the book) they're advised to start taking an annual test for breast cancer, according to the book. It's an X-Ray called a mammogram (a contrast medium used for detecting breast cancer is gadolinium according to the book). MRIs do a better job for "breast cancer screening" (according to book), but they're more expensive, and book says they take longer. And sometimes they give out false alarms (book calls it "false positives")... they say that breast cancer's there, but it's not really.
We covered that CT and MRI Scanner images are made by computers. They take a ton of data (information, according to book), and make an image. And then technologist or whoever is working on the thing can have fun with it. There's multiple ways of doing this. For one thing, the person can tell the computer to highlight certain areas and tissues with bright colors (according to book; one example used is tumors). And they can ignore certain areas... and can completely take them away from the image! That's what the book says, anyway. Each image can be especially fitted for what each patient needs and for even just the patient, according to the book. It's amazing how far computers have come, and how they're used even in just medical purposes!