• Question: if you found a new type of mri scanner how do you think it would work

    Asked by Steve to Mobeen on 17 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Mobeen Ali

      Mobeen Ali answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      That’s quite a complicated question. There is one type of MRI scanner although they can be built in different ways. They all have a magnetic field and generate signals from the hydrogen in the body.

      The lungs shouldn’t contain water, which would be really bad so they are quite hard to image. Instead we can use a gas (helium or xeon) that shows up on MRI. We can also see carbon-13 which is a slightly heavier form of carbon (which we can’t see).

      The future may be to combine different scanners so MRI and x-ray CT or MRI and PET.

Comments