Word: mri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...discovered that when these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark. This dark network (which comprises regions in the frontal, parietal and medial temporal lobes) is off when we seem to be on, and on when we seem to be off. If you climbed into an MRI machine and lay there quietly, waiting for instructions from a technician, the dark network would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your instructions arrived and your task began, the bees would freeze and the network would fall silent. When we appear to be doing nothing...
Hospital executives are responding to the assault of specialists by building and aggressively marketing profitable "service lines," like cancer, heart and brain centers. They're snapping up $1.4 million computed tomography (CT) scanners, which produce palpably detailed, 3-D pictures of bones and organs, and $2.2 million "high field" MRI machines that can watch the brain at work. The inflationary dynamic spawned by this expansion of health-care capacity exposes flaws in the payment system that sustains U.S. health care. Those flaws partly explain why Americans spend $2 trillion, or 16% of their GDP, for medical care, an outlay that...
Nowhere is this more apparent than in diagnostic imaging. Last year Americans spent more than $100 billion on outpatient scans. Medicare's imaging costs have been growing 16% a year, much faster than the 9.6% rise for all physician services. The most lucrative--MRI and CT--climbed 25% last year. A third of the testing, says Donahue of National Imaging, is inappropriate; doctors order unnecessary scans, or two when one would suffice. "This is one of the most unsavory and concerning areas of how imaging is delivered," he says. "It's when imaging studies are not based upon clinical needs...
...there yet. One thing to consider is that ultrasound tests, unlike CT and MRI scans, are extremely operator dependent; the results could vary widely from facility to facility. Also, your doctor, like most other physicians, would probably want to see more studies of the new test before being comfortable with calling off a biopsy. Barr already has that in the works. He is preparing a multicenter international trial with 2,000 patients that will start in January and take about a year. In the interim, women should not forget a yearly mammogram starting at age 40. For now, it remains...
...phenomenon could be the body's way of turning off potential distractions while you're trying to fall asleep, or it might be the result of fluids that rush through the brain while you're supine. Either way, the stifling effect may be an important consideration for reading MRI or PET scans, which take images of the body while you're lying down...