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A medical physicist working in MRI has a very busy day.  Because the main element of an MRI scanner is a giant magnet, there are certain safety issues that we need to keep on our minds at all times. No metal can come close to the MRI scanner – if you walked near a scanner with something like a key, it would fly out of your hand and stick to the scanner wall! The magnet can be more than a thousand times the strength of a typical fridge magnet. So one of our main jobs is to keep metal away – which can be hard sometimes when patients need to be scanned and they have things like pacemakers or replacement hips. We also do post processing of scans before the radiologist looks at the results. This makes extra information available for the doctors to base a medical diagnosis on. For example if there is a scan of a heart carried out, we can do some fancy analysis on the images and generate a number for the amount of blood flowing through the heart in a minute or calculate the speed the blood is flowing through the hearts valves at. Sometimes this information can help a doctor realise what is going on.

Working as a scientist in a hospital is great because the work we do can have an immediate and dramatic effect on a patient’s stay. One of the more challenging jobs for an MRI physicist is trying to make scan times shorter for patients, but at the same time keep the quality of the images produced up to as high a standard as possible. This can be trickey as it’s the opposite of what naturally happens! We run tests on the scanners to make sure they are preforming as well as they can at all times. We also screen patients before their scans so we can be absolutuly sure they have no metal in them or on them! Once all the patients have gotten safely through their scan we usually have some time to work on our own experiments and projects – my favourite part of the day.  When I started I got to scan a pineapple to learn how everything works!