Everyone who has had a family member in the hospital recently understands the importance of medical imaging equipment.
Doctors today rely on these machines to help diagnose and treat disease.
In the past, physicians relied on the symptoms and a few routine tests in order to determine your ailment.
However, the human body is such a complex combination of systems that there are thousands and thousands of things that could go wrong.
In order to gather more information before they made a diagnosis, surgeons would also perform exploratory surgery.
These methods often helped them make a more accurate conclusion; however, the surgery itself was very dangerous because the doctors never knew exactly for what they were looking.
As a result, more people would die from the surgery itself then whatever is was they had! Medical imaging machines, therefore, have greatly helped medicine become safer and more accurate.
Since imaging equipment is a non-invasive way to determine what the problem is, it is usually preferred over exploratory surgery.
Here are some common pieces of equipment that you might encounter if you ever find yourself or a family member in the hospital.
A magnetic resonance machine (MRI) is a very large, expensive machine that is used for several different kinds of body scans.
This type of equipment uses powerful polarized magnets to excite water molecules in your body's tissue.
The machine "reads" the data and produces a map of the inside of the body, which can be deciphered by medical machine specialists.
These specialists, radiologists, are trained specifically on how to operate and read the resulting images so that they can see if anything is not normal and help the attending doctor make the correct diagnosis.
Ultrasound machines are used most often to check the status of a pregnancy, but they are also used in other situations.
This equipment uses sound waves, which are inaudible to the human ear, to create a map of the human body by measuring the amount of time it takes for the wave to return to the machine.
The results are then mapped into a visual picture so that the doctors can make the correct interpretations.
X-ray machines are the most common types of medical imaging equipment.
They use electromagnetic radiation to take a quick black and white photo of what is beneath your skin.
These machines are mostly used to see broken bones because they do not take pictures of the tissue.
This equipment saves lives every day! Search the internet to find out more about all the amazing medical products out there!