Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
That is not odd at all given that an MRI does not use radiation while x-ray, CT scans, and nuclear imaging does.
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MRIs *are* nuclear imaging, in the sense that the imaging mechanism acts directly on atomic nuclei: it used to be called 'nuclear magnetic resonance' until the word 'nuclear' got a bad rap and scared people, so it was renamed.
And of course it uses radiation: radio waves, to be specific, at a far higher power than any wifi could ever dream of, so high that it is on for short bursts only to avoid heating effects and there are specific positions you must not sit in since they might create RF loops and serious burns. The magnetic field used is even stronger, stronger than any other field in the solar system, on the order of a thousand times stronger than Jupiter's and about ten times stronger than that in the centre of sunspots. (The field inside Jupiter and the Sun may well be stronger, but we can't get there to find out). It is still about a billion times weaker than the field around magnetars, which would be lethal from thousands of miles away and is so strong it polarizes spacetime itself
Careless use of MRI is *dangerous*: there have been deaths when people brought magnetized objects into the MRI room and they turned into basically very large bullets under the influence of the huge magnetic fields. (But careful use is basically completely safe, and injuries are very rare because careless use of MRI scanners is not common! There are no records of the high-power radio waves causing any harm to anyone who didn't manage to get an RF loop in their own body through e.g. sitting in forbidden positions. Since usually one is lying flat in a tube while MRI scans take place, these positions are damn hard to get into, by design, so it hardly ever happens. This is one reason why the tube is as confining as it is.)
What it isn't is PET scanning: there is no antimatter involved and no annihilation of water molecules inside your body, just wrenching of nuclear spin states with ridiculously powerful radio waves and magnets and waiting femtoseconds for them to relax again and spit out characteristic radio waves that can be detected. (Not that antimatter is actually that unusual, it turns out: there's antimatter annihilating right above your head whenever there's a big thunderstorm.)