For my report on Magnetism, I chose to use the subject of Medical Diagnosis, with the more narrow sub-topic of MRI's. MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. An MRI machine is fairly large, though new models are getting smaller and smaller for convenience. The MRI was used for the first time in 1977, having been designed by Dr. Raymond Damadian, a physician and scientist, along with colleagues Dr. Larry Minkoff and Dr. Michael Goldsmith. Their cumulative effort to perfect the machine took them nearly seven years.
The typical MRI machine is around seven foot tall, seven foot wide, and about ten foot long, though, generally, the newer the machine is, the smaller it is. The machine usually consists of a large circular magnet on one end and a horizontal tube running through the magnet. The patient lays on his or her back and gets slid into the magnet through the tube. Whether they go in head or feet first, and how far they are slid into the magnet depends upon the extent and area of their examination. The machine is generally used to discover what type of tissue any type of tissue is.
Using radio wave-like pulses of energy in conjunction with magnets, the MRI scanner can pick out a small point inside the patient's body and ask it, essentially, "What type of tissue are you?" The point can be as small as half a millimeter cubed. The MRI system goes through the patient's body a little at a time, constructing a two or three D map of tissue types. It then squashes all this information together to create a Two D image or a three D model.
I chose to use the MRI machine because it seemed to be an easily researchable topic. My biological father is radiologist, and I've always kind of wondered what exactly he did for a living. This seemed like a great chance to find out. If the doctor were to tell me I might have lung cancer, they would probably use an MRI on me to figure it out. That could have a pretty big impact on your life, right there.