PEDIATRICS Vol. 71 No. 5 May 1983, pp. 852-854
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NMR Imaging in Pediatric Practice

FRANCIS W. SMITH MB CHB, DMRD, FFR1

1 Department of Radiology, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, Foresterhill, Aberdeen AB9 2ZB, Scotland

Since before Roentgen's discovery of x-rays, man has been searching for a noninvasive method for assessing the soft tissue organs of the body. For many decades this need has been met by standard x-ray techniques. When x-rays pass through a body, they are absorbed by that body in differing amounts depending upon their density. Because most soft tissues have similar densities, conventional radiography is unable to differentiate overlapping soft tissue structures. In the early 1970s this difficulty was overcome by the development of x-ray computed tomography (CT). This advance in radiodiagnosis utilizes the same principle of measuring different coefficients of absorption, but collects data from many different directions and reconstructs them mathematically to display them as a cross-sectional image.