Medical imaging is a range of technologies used to view the human body for diagnosis, monitoring, or treatment of medical conditions. As a medical imaging technician, your duties will depend on the type of healthcare facility you work in. With the rapid advancement of technology, medical images are at a crucial point and doctors and technologists can now check if a therapeutic drug works in a matter of hours and detect diseases before they become incurable. To enter the medical imaging field, you may need to earn a certificate in a six-month program.
Radiologists are licensed doctors who specialize in interpreting digital images and must complete four years of medical school, one year of internship, and four years of residency in their medical imaging field. Common outcomes for those who earn a degree in medical imaging include working as a technician, technologist, assistant, or nurse. Popular and lucrative specializations include radiology and ultrasound. The 1950s saw a major advancement in medical imaging with nuclear medicine becoming a viable diagnostic imaging tool.
Medical imaging involves the interaction of radiation with tissue and the design of technical systems to extract clinically relevant information which is then represented in image format. Medical imaging informatics is an interdisciplinary field that includes machine learning, machine vision, imaging science (radiology, biomedical) and image processing. It can be used for tasks such as organ delineation, tumor identification in the lungs, diagnosis of spinal deformities, and detection of arterial stenosis. Medical imaging allows doctors to better evaluate patients' bones, organs, tissues, and blood vessels without invasive means.
It has become an essential part of daily clinical routine for detecting and diagnosing various diseases. Also known as radiology, medical imaging is the field of medicine that uses images to diagnose or treat medical conditions.
