The sophomore college baseball player told his coach that he was going home for the day. After waiting nearly two weeks for an MRI scan that still had not even been scheduled, the athlete decided to take matters into his own hands. With calls to a physician and former athletic trainer back home, the baseball player was able to schedule his own MRI for later that afternoon. As a promising starting pitcher for the upcoming spring season, the athlete was tired of waiting to see what was wrong with his knee.
Unfortunately, how soon a medical condition is diagnosed can mean the difference between a good prognosis and a less than favorable prognosis. For instance, patients with various kinds of cancers and tumors are almost always more successfully treated if the problem is detected early. Diagnostic imaging centers play an important role in both the detection and treatment of many of the most common health conditions. With this in mind, working with a healthcare center that can quickly provide the needed diagnostic services is key to al patients.
Radiology centers and other diagnostic imaging centers can be busy places. Being told, however, that you have to wait days or even weeks for a scan can be frustrating.
Radiology Centers Help Provide Diagnostic Services
Although they can be used for nearly all parts of the body, nearly 6.6 million of the 20 million MRIs in America are used for head scans. It may not be surprising that 22% of these medical scans are used for head images when you realize that this was the initial intent of the first ever MRI scanning machines. As a way to provide an image that was not an x-ray, MRI machines were first developed to help doctors see the brain of their patients. These first radiology imaging devices were few and far between in the beginning. As the technology has evolved, however, radiology centers have become an important part of many hospitals throughout the country.
With the scan itself lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours, an MRI scan provides more information than an x-ray because it can produce 3-D images that can be digitally viewed from many different angles.
Because the patient has to lay perfectly still during an MRI, the hospital or radiology center provides the patient with specific instructions for preparing for the scan. For instance, you will be asked to not eat anything the morning or day of the procedure. Following the scan, patients most often need to wait to get the results once the doctor and other MRI readers have an opportunity to look over the images.
Although initially known for the loud volume of the machine while it makes its scan, such technologies like open MRIs make the process more bearable for even the most sensitive patients. And while the process was initially developed for creating scans of the human skull and brain, doctors and scientists continue to find many other applications for this detailed scanning method.
Imaging Results Help Look for Irregularities in a Variety of Situations
As radiology centers continue to develop and expand the MRI technology, others beyond the medical field continue to find these detailed 3-D images useful. For example, scanning devices are now used throughout the manufacturing industry to test for the stability of new parts of all sizes. Additionally, scanning services are used in airport security and other locations for safety purposes.
Recently, MRI scans have also been used to evaluate the speech recognition centers of dogs. A recent study reported by National Public Radio (NPR) indicated that dogs are able to understand specific words spoken by humans. NPR went on with follow up research and discovered that this discovery about dogs and their ability to understand human language was actually discovered through MRI brain scans.
Although not every dog was comfortable enough to be trained to lay completely still in an MRI for eight minutes for the testing, researchers at a university in Budapest was able to train a select group to stay completely still for a scan. With no restraints needed then, the researchers determined that dogs could resond to not only tone, but exact words, of their owners.