• Question: What parts of the body do you scan during an MRI

    Asked by FrancescaC to Andy on 16 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Andrew Scott

      Andrew Scott answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      You can pretty much scan any part of the body you can think of. It’s particularly good for soft tissues, so the joints between your bones, the organs in your body and brains are often scanned. The brain is one of the main areas MRI is used and can be used to look at the connections in your brain. There are some really amazing pictures of the brain connections, produced using MRI here:
      http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/gallery/

      It’s also used to work out what different parts of the brain are used for in a type of MRI called functional MRI.

      In my department we do cardiovascular MRI, so we do scans of the heart and blood vessels. We can look for areas of the heart muscle damaged in a heart attack or affected by inherited diseases. We can also look for arteries thickened by heart disease. Scanning the heart is hard because it moves all the time, but it’s interesting and the pictures are great!

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