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MEDICAL IMAGING

"Go and look at your toes, John," my Mother used to tell me when she was choosing shoes. So I would obediently trot off to the X-ray machine.

Not that I was ever really obedient but I liked the X-ray machine because you could see your toes wiggle. The machine was a bit like an old fashioned wooden upright coin-weighing machine with an opening for your feet and a viewing glass to peer down at your bones, suddenly bereft of shoes, socks, and skin through the magic of X-rays. I thought my toe bones wiggled magnificently.

No longer are these machines available in shoe stores to check whether the shoes fit your feet scaremongers drove them away. But they were among the most original of medical imaging techniques available to us. Now we have many other techniques and scaremongers are still out there trying to turn off progress. Most of the new imaging techniques are nuclear in character and scaremongers cannot tell nuclear bombs from nuclear science just as they cannot distinguish between a TV cartoon and wisdom.

But the spigot is open and so much benefit flows from medical imaging that the scaremongers have generally moved on, bleating, to other irrationalities.

The X-ray - we all know. Although not as instant as in older shoe stores, it is still digitally fast. The doctor can see bone images within 5 to 10 minutes of asking. He sees bone the hard stuff through which the X-rays cannot penetrate to the film, so unfortunately he cannot see the soft stuff such as muscles. X-rays are great to see fractures but cannot see meniscus tears or blood.

Of course, a blood analysis provides a chemical image of the body but it is an average image referring to the instantaneous average condition. It will tell you whether you have high cholesterol or perhaps confirm something like gout with a high uric acid count, but otherwise it is very limited.

Ultra-sound imaging is immediate. Its principal benefit is that the soft tissue image can be seen in movement. High-frequency sound detects soft tissue and by creating a triangular section mapping tissue in a two dimensional plane one can see movement. It's particularly good for finding blood clots or things, which you might not have expected in the womb.

Then came the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging system and the scaremongers bleated once more. Baaa! Baaa! However, removing the word nuclear' was sufficient to satisfy them and the MRI is now an established medical tool.

With the patient lying at the center of a magnet, in conjunction

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