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Comment by NautilusWave | Hacker News Reader

This is a weird title, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance technology was first used in the field of Chemistry for identifying the structure and content of molecules. The medical industry was later able to adopt it, under the name MRI, for medical imaging. This should really be considered an extension of NMR.

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Note that the medical industry chose MRI because it hides a word that is so taboo they don't even want to see it mentioned anywhere: "Nuclear", from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, even though it has nothing to do with radiations in this particular case.

Not so sure medicine is afraid to use the word "nuclear". Nuclear medicine a field that patients deal with regularly from getting bone density scans for osteoporosis, thyroid and cardiac imaging, etc. In the US at least the name of the department is plastered on signs in hospitals next to everything else. As for why "nuclear" was dropped from I don't know the exact reason.

>> Note that the medical industry chose MRI because it hides a word that is so taboo they don't even want to see it mentioned anywhere: "Nuclear"

> Not so sure medicine is afraid to use the word "nuclear".

MRI was originally called NMRI (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging), but "nuclear" was dropped to avoid negative associations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging

Probably because while nuclear medicine and most of radiology uses actual ionizing radiation for almost everything... NMR is ironically one mode that doesn’t involve it at all. Per informed consent, patients ought to know that XRay and CT and nuclear studies involve radiation, it would be unethical to hide that. But MR shouldn’t have an unnecessary image problem.

Nitpick: modern bone density scans use X-rays, and don't typically fall under nuclear medicine.

I mean RF is an important part of NMR and it's radiation.

I had an MRI scan last year, and not a single label or sign in the hospital said "MRI", they all sais "NMR". I find it hard to imagine that the use of the word 'nuclear' would deter hospitals from using it, given their heavy use of x-rays and various radioactive isotopes. But who knows, maybe my hospital is the exception here.

The technique described here differs a great deal from traditional chemical NMR. That NMR is a spectroscopy technique where the signal includes contributions from huge numbers of atoms. Molecular struture is inferred from the spectra measured by traditional NMR, not viewed in an image. This article describes an imaging technique where images of individual atoms are obtained by a reconstruction algorithm that depends on the imaged volume being in a magnetic gradient - somewhat like a hospital MRI scanner.

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