I don’t even know the right kind of flair for this question- tech? physics? biology?
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eta: thank you everyone! This is all very helpful. I was in the big MRI tube yesterday and had no idea how the technology actually worked. So cool!
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Physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering. And a whole lot of math.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+mri+works has good results but I’ll give a quick rundown.
All medical imaging effectively is sending energy at the subject and seeing what goes through or back. X-ray and CT use X-ray and a detector on the opposite side and you catch where the X-ray energy passed through to find things that are denser.
MRI puts the subject in a magnetic field. Hydrogen atoms line up inside a magnetic field. Radio energy is ‘shined’ on the subject, and the machine ‘listens’ to what it hears back. The computers attached then take the signal and construct an image from that.
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