Medical imaging techniques brought to life in physics lecture

Published: 17 February, 2011

Dr Michael Wilson from the Nuclear Medicine Department of the University Hospital Birmingham NHS Trust gave a whistle-stop tour through various imaging techniques in his fascinating lecture 'From X-rays to antimatter' held at Plymouth College earlier this week.  His inspiring lecture revealed how over the past hundred years physicists have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques to see inside the body.

Pupils from Year 9 to Sixth Form, along with students from eight other schools, were given an insight into how CT scanners, PET scanners, radioisotope scanners and magnetic resonance imagers work.  The lecture, organised by the Institute of Physics, was full of amazing audio/visual media and there were a number of hands-on demonstrations including an explosion of coloured balls to show how detectors receive signals from various locations inside the body and the 'spinning girl', which demonstrated magnetic resonance imaging in which a patient is put in a very strong magnetic field and radio waves are used to image different 'slices' through the body.

"We were delighted to host the first of 30 lectures that Dr Wilson is giving at schools around the country", said physics teacher, Jean Pope.  "About 500 students attended across two sessions and it was a great opportunity for them to experience such a wide range of medical imaging techniques first hand."