Radley’s sneaky spicy cheatsheet for imaging modalities!
X-ray
Super quick zappyzap! One-to-three images in the UK, unless you’re doing something fancy like stitching scolio spines. Fast, cheap, and very good at looking at bones / basic abdominal organ pathology / size of your heart. You hold still for like, one second. Then - ZOOP! You’re done.
CT
X-ray BUT MORE X-RATED! Much, much higher dose, because it’s basically taking a ridiculous amount of x-ray images while spinning the gantry (the ‘camera’, so to speak) around you at very high speed, and then algorithmically compiling those images to create a 3d digital construction of your innards! Very useful for looking at internal organs, especially with contrast media that makes pathology all shiny and pretty. Sometimes slower & always more expensive than X-ray, but much faster & cheaper than MRI. Patients can’t move for the duration (unless you’re doing cardiac stuff that takes a picture only in the lull between heartbeats - very cool!).
MRI
CT BUT WITH MAGNETS (okay it’s not really much like CT except that it creates slices of the body in all three planes). There’s no ionising radiation! It produces really, really clear, gorgeous pictures that show off soft tissue beautifully! We like that!! But… it’s also really slow, really expensive, and really claustrophobic. A lot of patients don’t enjoy it, and who can blame 'em? Who wants to be stuck in a small tube for a half hour while it makes horrid boomy noises at you? And you’re not allowed to move at all? (we don’t even like you to breathe too fast or too slow!)
Ultrasound
SOUNDWAVES GO BOUNCYBOUNCE. Though it produces a relatively unclear image that you need a lotta extra training to decipher, the tech is super cheap and available, and it’s very quick to use! There’s no ionising radiation involved! AND you can use it for realtime imaging - so, you can see a foetus move as it happens, rather than this movement messing up your entire image, or having to be carefully planned around!
Fluoroscopy
X RAY BUT VIDEO. This is a constant (and therefore high dose) real-time 'video’ taken with X-ray, which can visualise movements within the body. You can watch contrast media (shiny juice) shift around to ensure that systems are functioning correctly! You can watch surgeons push their guide wires/stents/etc. into place, to be sure they hit the right spot! Or you can inject Shiny Juice into the blood vessels and, with angiography, watch it flow around the heart/brain to find blockages!
Nuclear med
WE STICK THE RADIOACTIVE STUFF IN YOU. For instance, we give you a radioactive tracer in a solution with stuff that binds well to bony metastases…. and BOOM we can see all your bony metastases on a PET-CT/MRI because they’re glowing red-hot! Or we IV a nuclear tracer into your heart and make you exercise/give you meds that raise your heart rate and BOOM we can see whether your heart has an adequate blood supply during exertion!
