Things You Need To Know About CT Scans

Things You Need To Know About CT Scans

If you watch hospital dramas or comedies such as Scrubs and House, you often hear Dr. Gregory House or Dr. Kelso to their respective patients to "take a full body scan or CT scan to identify tumors for diagnosis."

We would either laugh or react to it, but for those who haven't been discharged and checked in to a medical facility, we might be wondering what they're talking about.

A full scan can be understood through context clues, but what about a CT Scan?

There are various types of scans in medical facilities. A full scan is the method of scanning and screening a patient's entire body through scanning machine.

A full scanner is a device that captures an image of a patient's body, including its internal structures to search and detect possible malignancies.

A full scan provides doctors and patients alike a complete and detailed 3-dimensional visualization of the entire human body.

One of the more common full body scanners are a CT Scan, or Computed Tomography Scan. Closely identical to it is the CAT Scan, or Computed Axial Tomography Scan.

The keyword axial demonstrates the body scanner's ability to generate a 3-D image of the human body during the entire process, with each image called a slice.

CT Scan and other modes of scanning have the incredible ability to potentially dissect and detect diseases and other malignancies in its early stages, such as cancer cells. Early identification of such elements can help improve the probability of successfully curing such illnesses.

Therefore, CT Scan and scanning are an awesome tool for preventive screening.

However, CT Scans are quite controversial due to the amount of radiation the machine emits, which can be absorbed in high doses by the human body, risking the possibility of acquiring cancerous cells.

Due to high radiation exposure, doctors are weighing on the option if patient's body can outweigh the benefits of undergoing CT Scan than gaining more risks. Full scan techniques are also unable to detect the exact colors of the body's internal structure, unlike in colonoscopy, where you get a realistic view of how your insides exactly look like.

Fortunately, the technology made in CT Scans and full body scans allows doctors to get a detailed and clearer view of the body, which can uncover various malignancies in its benign stage, like infections or tissue defects, and polyps, an early stage in which a cell could potentially regress in our bodies, and develop into a cancer.

If you're opting for a partial scan instead of as a whole, doctors also allow patients to undergo MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging. MRI machines offer less risk than CT Scans, since MRI's do not emit any radiation.

Instead, MRI examinations are based on magnetic and radio wave frequency signals that are visualized through the computer, and its gathered data is generated into a conclusive image of the body part.

Types of partial scans include the brain, heart, skeletal or bone density MRI, angiogram, pelvic, abdominal, and other body parts that are applicable for MRI evaluation.

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