At the end of the day I feel like you won that one.
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At the end of the day I feel like you won that one.
Saturday afternoon I had essentially 3 MRIs - cervical, thoracic and lumbar spine (yeah my back is jacked). It annoys me that my ears are still ringing. Holy fuck was that loud. They gave me earplugs but still it was ridiculously loud and sounded like a traffic emergency in Bangkok, all these crazy different sounds at top fucking volume for ~75 minutes, holy shit. Annoying.
MRI's came out well after I finished med school so I have no idea how they work, but all the different banging noises make no sense to me. One day maybe I'll take the time to learn about. Or maybe stop getting MRI's. I'm too busy trying not to panic from claustrophobia to let the noise bother me.
I was amused by the banging noises and fell asleep. My MRI in July was of the brain.
I used ear plugs and headset together when I did shoulder MRI recently. Didn’t help my claustrophobia and anxiety any. Never had any of that before but I was starting to freak out the last 10 minutes…
They should really offer Valium before MRI's.
I love valium...
:D
What in the fuck.
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Of all the year and half’s to pick too.
Kudos
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The annoying MRI buzzing noise is from the rapid switching on and off of the secondary radiofrequency gradient coils that you put the anatomy of interest in- the plastic holder deal has a lot of wires in it that transmit and receive tons of RF energy like a two way antenna. In a nutshell it transmits energy and then listens for the signal coming back over and over again. When it is energized on and off rapidly, it vibrates making the noise.
The secondary coils use the RF energy to localize the signal from a particular 3D voxel within the larger main magnetic field. The scan reads out the information voxel by voxel, so it takes a long time to produce a large 3D volume (and to get good signal to noise there will generally be a couple runs to average). It has to be done as quickly as possible because people move (and time is money of course).
It's getting worse as technology marches on- we are getting more complicated coil designs trying to get more signal. Also we are moving towards stronger and stronger primary magnets so you need stronger gradient coils. A few vendors have introduced quieter systems that generally modulate the RF pulses to be less harsh, but I'm not sure how well they work.
There's also a pump noise that is always going to keep the superconducting main magnet cool, but that one is usually not as loud as the coil noise during the imaging.