Consultant radiologist and Chief Medical Director at Prisms Healthcare Ltd, Dr Abiodun Kuti, in this interview with TOBI AWORINDE, discusses diagnostic radiology and some modern medical breakthroughs in radiologyis an aspect of medicine that is rarely discussed until people need a scan done. Why is this?
Radiology is a subspecialty in medical practice in which you make diagnosis and treat with different equipment. It has been there but it is not a widespread, popular part of medicine and that is why many people have never really known about radiology until several years ago when diagnostic medicine became popular. That is why radiology has been at the back of the practice of medicine. But from the beginning, radiology has been the bedrock of medicine.
The word ‘radiology’ starts with using radiation to make a diagnosis. But now, we utilise more than radiation, that is, the X-ray, to make a diagnosis. So, ‘radiology’ is now a misnomer, because it is not only X-rays that we use to make diagnosis; we use ultrasound and MRI , which do not use radiation to make diagnosis.I can tell you that radiology is the most dynamic part of medicine.
In MRI also, we started with probably 0.5 Tesla, which is the strength of the magnets, probably 20 years ago. As of now, we are talking of an eight to 10-Tesla MRI, which can show you as little as the cells of the body. Of course, we have interventional radiology now, where you can go through blood vessels and block the blood flow to a tumour in any part of the body, so it can shrink, before the surgeons go in and operate on it.
Also, radiology has evolved from just making diagnoses. It has gone into management, that is, treatment of diseases. That is where interventional radiology comes in. Within 40 years, we have got to a stage where we are just using images which you see in two dimensions to a situation in which you are seeing an image five-dimensionally. We have the technology now in which you can use 5D projectors to look inside a patient and see the organs working and know where the problems are.
Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)
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