Question: what body parts do you look at

Jill Magee answered on 11 Mar 2013:

The answer to this question is really long – I could go on for ages! I’ll keep it short for you.

You will all have heard of x-rays. We use this to image bones in our body. X-rays is a form of radiation which is also used by something we call a CT scanner.

CT means Computed Tomography. This type of scan lets us view structures in your body ranging from your brain, liver, lungs and heart.

A Magnetic Resonance (MR) scan also allows us to see these structures, but it uses magnetic fields instead of radiation. This is obviously good as too much radiation can be bad for us.

Another way we can view structures is using ultrasound. This uses sound waves that travel through the body and is commonly used to view the heart. You may have heard of ultrasound being used on pregnant women to see their baby.

So all the above show us the structures of our body. We can also see how various parts of the body are working. These are called Nuclear Medicine scans – where we give the patient radiation that travels in their body and allows us to see their body working when we scan them. We can see a number of different things using these scans – skeletal system, heart, lungs, kidneys, gall bladder, brain, stomach, thyroid, parathyroid! Its a long list.

You can see that some of the imaging types can view the same part of the body. The way we choose what imaging technique to use depends on what we want out of the scan. If we wanted to see how well someones brain was working, then we would pick a Nuclear Medicine scan. However if we wanted to see what the brain looked like, rather than its function, then we could use a CT scan or an MR scan.

I hope this has given you some idea of my work.