I’ve never had a mammogram so I actually don’t know how it works. Only heard the jokes about how they squish your breasts and that it hurts. We were talking about how men can have breast cancer so why don’t they get mammograms? (Maybe they do). Then we laughed as we pretended to slip a tiny man boob into an imaginary mammogram machine (that I’ve never seen).
So I thought they can do X-rays and stuff. Why do they *have* to torture you to get the results. Did some sick doctor invent the machine, laughing the whole time about how evil and unnecessary it is? /s
Biology tag? Idk.
In: Biology
There’s physics behind it.
When we take an X Ray, we place a part of the body between two sides of a device – one shoots a ton of x-ray particles through the tissue, the other side detects how many x-rays pass through the tissue. When the x-ray particles are shot through the tissue, three things can happen:
1) absorption: they get absorbed by our body
2) transmission: they pass through our body completely
3) scattering: they can hit something along their trajectory and change angle, but still pass through the body.
The reason a mammogram works is because cancer tissue and other dense types of tissue absorb different amounts of particles from normal tissue, so when we see how many pass through at the detector we can see whether there’s a tumor and how big it is.
The scattering part is a confounding factor though: we mainly just want to look at the difference between 1 and 2. If some of the particles are changing direction, our imaging can trick us, because the x-rays that go through the cancer tissue can look like they came from normal tissue at the detector (or vice versa).
To minimize that problem, we have to shorten the distance between the two sides of the imaging device. So when the particles scatter and change angle, they travel as little as possible horizontally and we can be more confident that they came from the correct location/tissue type in the body. That means compressing the tissue if possible.
Latest Answers