What is Medical Imaging?
Medical imaging is the process of creating pictures and images of parts of the body to assist doctors with examination and diagnosis. Images are created using painless techniques without the need to cut open the body. Medical imaging covers many disciplines and is used by most areas of the healthcare sector. In recent years the development of computer technology, twinned with advances in 3D medical imaging systems, has meant a growing use of new and ever more advanced image reconstruction and display. This article on MRI scan is written by Jackie Griffiths, a freelance journalist who writes health, medical, biological, and pharmaceutical articles for national and international journals, newsletters and web sites.
Medical imaging is a discipline within the medical field which involves the use of technology to take images of the inside of the human body. These images are used in diagnostics, as teaching tools, and in routine healthcare for a variety of conditions. Medical imaging is sometimes referred to as diagnostic imaging, because it is frequently used to help doctors arrive at a diagnosis, and there are a number of different types of technology used in medical imaging. The goal of medical imaging is to provide a picture of the inside of the body in a way which is as non-invasive as possible. An imaging study can be used to identify unusual things inside the body, such as broken bones, tumors, leaking blood vessels, and so forth. One of the most famous types of diagnostic imaging is the x-ray, which uses radiation to take a static image of a specific area of the body. In addition to x-rays and related computed tomography (CT) technology, it is also possible to use ultrasound to look inside th
The term Medical Imaging, to some, may invoke ideas of images of brain slices acquired from modern ‘brain scanners’. However, the breadth of this subject is far wider: exemplar applications include the creation of 3D graphical models for facial reconstruction from scan data, visualisation of complex vascular (blood vessel) structures to assist key-hole surgical procedures, techniques for creating patient-specific 3D modelling of human organ shapes and image-based methods for characterising defects in the cardiac (heart muscle) cycle, and a whole host of methods designed to detect various pathologies and disease states in humans. The images on this page represent some of the research work in medical imaging undertaken in the Medical Imaging Group at Surrey. All of these applications and others require a firm grasp of theory taken from the areas of image and signal processing, computer vision, pattern recognition and computer graphics.
