MRI Imaging
MRIs revolutionized medicine when they began to reach hospitals in the early 1980s. For the first time, using MRIs, physicians could see clear, detailed images of soft tissues inside the body, including muscles, bones, blood vessels, internal organs, and the brain.
It was almost magical. Until the advent of the MRI, doctors relied on X-rays. These provided bright, detailed images of bones. Physicians would search those images for clues to try to understand what might be going on in the organs and muscles around them.
CT scans were an improvement. They were X-rays taken at different angles and sewn together by software to create a 3D image of the body. They showed soft tissue, but with lower contrast and detail than MRI for many applications.
As a result, the only way for clinicians to truly visualize suspected cancer was to perform exploratory surgery to determine a tumor's location and severity. Exploratory surgery was also necessary to assess nerve damage or aneurysms or hard to pin down vague symptoms.
Today, MRIs provide high-resolution images into the body's hidden recesses. Oncologists, for example, use them to find and evaluate tumors and also see if a treatment shrinks them. Neurologists use MRIs to determine the severity of strokes and tumors and to study degenerative diseases. Orthopedists routinely rely on MRI images to plan complex surgeries involving tendons, ligaments, cartilage, muscle, and bone. Cardiologists use them to assess damage after a heart attack or stroke as well as infections, congenital defects, valve disease, protein buildup, and other problems.
It took a string of incredible bioengineering achievements to get here. MRIs were among the first large‑scale commercial systems to rely on superconducting magnets. To produce accurate results, MRI systems needed to produce uniform magnetic fields that did not generate random disruptions when the magnets pulsed on and off. They also needed high-speed computers to collect and process the firehose of data MRIs collected. Yet biomedical engineers and scientists overcame these and many more challenges to create one of medicines’ most valuable tools.