Cat Scan

In the twenty first century humans have developed many important tools to fight diseases. The CAT scan or computed tomography (CT) scan is one of the tools that have helped save countless lives. The CAT scan is a diagnostic procedure that uses X-rays to look inside your body with the aid of computers. It has been used for the detection of broken bones, cancer, blood clots, signs of heart diseases and internal bleeding. You can find a CT scanner in most US hospitals and hospitals all around the world, even though it's very expensive. This procedure is a huge improvement from the old way of opening the body with a scalpel and looking around like in autopsies.

Unlike traditional X-ray machines that only underlines bone, the CT scanner gives you much more detail. For example: the CT scanner will show a 3D demonstration of the skull or cranial blood vessels in the computers. That's far better that a dark picture of bones. When a patient comes into the CAT scan room all that he sees is a table and something that resembles a huge donut. The patient is asked to lie down on the table. The way that he lies down on the table, will depend on what the doctors are looking for. If the doctor needs to see the thoracic cavity then the patient is asked to raise his hands. The table soon begins to slowly move through the center of the CT scanner. The scan is painless and sometimes the patients have to use a contrast dye which makes it better for the scanner to see some objects or receive and injection. Like anything in the medical field it requires trained experts and technicians to properly operate it. That's understandable considering that complexity of the CAT scan. The best thing about the CAT scan is that it's painless. Lets take Carlos for example, Carlos is going to get his pelvis looked at because he's been experiencing some abnormal pain. The doctor tells him to drink a concentration of barium sulfate. Then Carlos is told to lye on the table and raises his hands. That is all that Carlos will be required to do. It was painless and the Doctors found out that he had renal stones, which they were able to treat at an early stage.

A CAT scan isn't as simple as you computer scanner, it's much more complex. The CAT scan has two sensors an X-ray source, which releases the X-rays and an X-ray detector, which examines the number of X-rays that strike various parts of the patient's body. X-ray machines have that same concept but what separates and X-ray machine form a CT scanner is the CT scanners ability to rotate and receive multiple images of the patient's cavities. These images from various angles are then received by the computer. The computer then uses all that data and forms a three dimensional model of that organ. By moving the patient through the scanner the computer receives several parallel images called, slices. The doctors examine these slices to better understand the three dimensional model. Sometimes, the X-ray images won't be clear enough and they will require an aid. When that is the case doctor may inject the patient with an agent that will help see the contrast of different tissues in the body. Other times, the patient might be asked to drink a substance that will make the internal organs easier to examine. When they are asked to drink, it's often something to do in the abdominopelic cavity.

Nevertheless, the CAT scan wasn't just created one day by one person. It has taken several generations to develope the CAT scan that we see today. On November 1898 an inventor called Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen accidently found X-ray images from his wooden cathode ray generator. He was surprised by his discovery and decided to experiment. A week later, Wilhelm took a picture of his wifes hand and was astonished to see all of her finger bones and her ring. This picture was a scandal in the scientific community and made head lines all over the word. Just the thought that you could take a picture of someone's insides was intriguing to most folks at the time. Wilhelm called these ray X-rays (X meaning unknown) but, in Germany they are called Rontgen rays. Scientists later found