Nobody wants to hear they have a tumor anywhere in their body. It might turn out to be benign, but it may also be malignant. If you have a tumor anywhere, it’s not exactly good news, but it’s definitely a cause for significant concern if it’s close to your brain.
As any doctor will tell you, finding such tumors early and dealing with them is usually your best chance of surviving if it does turn out that the tumor is malignant. You can go to a Southern Utah MRI facility if you live in that part of the country and have reason to suspect you have a tumor. The MRI should give your doctor a clear image of your brain and any tumors that are present.
You may not know much about MRI technology or the way it revolutionized early brain tumor detection. Some patients like to have this information, though, so let’s take a few moments to talk about its inception and why these machines are so valued by the medical profession.
An Overview
We’ll start with an overview of why MRIs are helpful when trying to identify brain tumors. If you don’t know much about MRIs, the reason why they are valuable as a tool for doctors is because of the clarity of the images they produce. They can show what is happening inside your body with a degree of detail that is simply impossible for other methods to duplicate.
The human brain features soft, pliable tissue. It’s very delicate, and doctors need to collect images of it with the utmost care if they believe something could be wrong.
That’s where an MRI comes in. A doctor can get a series of images from different angles that are highly detailed, but the process is also relatively non-invasive. It’s that combination that makes this tool so valuable, not just for producing images of the human brain, but of many other parts of the body that might sustain damage or feature abnormalities as well.
What Diagnosis Looked Like Before MRIs
To understand how useful MRIs are in looking at the human brain, it’s helpful to know what the technology was like prior to the implementation of this methodology. If you go back before the 1980s, when MRIs started being widely used to look at the brain, you will see something called PEG, or pneumoencephalopathy, being used.
This was a form of imaging that was relatively common before brain MRIs. The procedure involved the draining of cerebrospinal fluid from the patient. Air was used to replace it.
The doctor would then take X-rays of the patient. If the air-filled venticals were distorted, that indicated a tumor was present. It was an imperfect method, but there was a much more serious problem associated with it. It was very painful.
A patient who went through this process would have to call on their fortitude to get through it. It was as invasive as it was painful, and the patient would often have to undertake various methods of pain management while they were recovering. With such a practice widely in use, it’s easy to see why MRIs were viewed as such a godsend for individuals who potentially had brain tumors.
That wasn’t the only method that doctors used before the 1980s, though.
Cerebral Angiographies
Another option was for a patient with a suspected brain tumor to get a cerebral angiography. For this method to be effective, contrast dyes needed to be directly inserted into the brain’s arteries.
The idea behind this was for doctors to observe how the dye-filled blood vessels reacted. If there was a mass, like a tumor, then they would be distorted.
This method basically worked, but it was less than ideal. That was because the injection of the dye would not cause the tumor itself to be seen. Instead, the doctors were only able to view the effects that the tumor was having on the surrounding structures.
If this method revealed what doctors felt was a tumor, they would have to go in to try and remove it. They would not know exactly the size or location of the tumor before opening up the patient’s skull, though, hardly an ideal way to go about a precision surgery.
Other Methods Prior to the Arrival of MRIs
There were other methods of potentially identifying brain tumors that the medical profession tried before MRIs became common practice. A tumor might be discovered during exploratory surgery if a doctor felt that a patient most likely had a brain tumor based on their symptoms.
There was also the option of nuclear medicine scans. This involved tests with radioactive tracers. The tracers would accumulate in tumors, and these would appear as hot spots on the patient’s body scan.
This method was another way of identifying a likely tumor site, but, similar to exploratory surgery or cerebral angiographies, it was hardly a perfect or elegant solution. The reality is that all of the methods we’ve mentioned that were common prior to MRIs were either painful, imprecise, or unwieldy.
The Bottom Line
If you look at what came before MRIs vs. what came after, it’s like night and day. An MRI might prove a little uncomfortable for a patient, since you must go all the way into a narrow tube and hear loud clanging noises that are disruptive and a little frightening. However, if you look at the other options that were available to doctors prior to MRIs existing, virtually any patient would prefer an MRI.
What’s even better news for patients in the modern era is that MRIs are getting better. The technology is such that patients now don’t have to spend as much time in the tube as they once did to get the images doctors need to figure out the tumor’s exact location and how large it is. The noises are not as loud or disruptive, either.
It is clear that MRIs made identifying brain tumors a much easier process than anything that came before.
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