clar fon on Nostr: so, fun fact, the full name of MRI is NMRI, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, and ...

so, fun fact, the full name of MRI is NMRI, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, and it's the same NMR that chemists use to get a better idea of the molecular structure of things

but the N got cut off from the name because people were terrified of nuclear technology at the time even though it's completely unrelated to nuclear fission

also kinda explains a bit more why human MRI scans require so much extra software to get a good reading, since you're effectively just measuring the molecular structure of everything in an area of the body at once and it's really hard to sift through the noise in that to figure out what you actually care about

it's nuclear magnetic resonance because you're literally measuring how much the nuclei of various atoms react to a fucking massive magnetic field, and it can tell you stuff about even the structure of relatively complex molecules because, as you'd expect, the position of atoms relative to each other can dramatically change the results