Comment by lostlogin
10 days ago
A whole body MRI is low resolution and thick slices, they are crap.
Instead you could get thin slices at high resolution of a body site that has issues or is suspected to have them. Do that instead.
Whole body MR is 5-8mm thick slices at low in-plane resolution. A whole body scan has about 512 pixels over a 50-60cm field of view. Usually it’s even less pixels than this.
Something like a knee, or brain is 2-3mm slices, and high in-plane resolution. A knee is 512 or even 720 pixels over 14cm. It’s vastly better. The difference is stark.
A liver scan or other abdominal organ is lower resolution than a joint or brain, but unlike whole body MR is scanned in multiple planes with multiple image weighting (t1 in/out/fat sat, diffusion, t2, t2fs, gadolinium contrast). A liver scan has thin slices.
Whole body scans generally do two coronal images (stir and t1) then call it quits.
Yes the machines should definitely get better, but I recommend you do get it if the cost it truly zero. Based on the data in the article it is still worth it despite the low resolution!
Sorry, I edited my above comment to remove references to myself.
For clarity, I’m an MR tech and I can get scans of myself if I want to.
I generally don’t scan myself as it gets messy fast. If I had concerns and for some reason couldn’t get a proper imaging referral, I’d get a scan with small, good coils with high element counts (not body coils like whole body imaging uses) and scan individuals body regions.