August 17, 2021 • 41 mins
At long last Chuck and Josh dive into the nuts and bolts of what makes the Wonder Machine so wondrous and find it actually lives up to the years-long hype they’ve given it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry is with us
as we journey into the heart of the magnetic darkness
known as an m r I machine, the Wonder Machine.
(00:27):
After all these years of talking about this thing, I
finally get it. I know it. It's crazy. We've been
kind of amazed by it and then a little bit
turned off by it. But then we realized it's not
the machine itself, it's the way it's being applied. And
so we kind of came back to it again and
it nuzzled us and it's bore and it got kind
(00:48):
of sexy. Yeah, and we're also guilty of the f
m r I crime that now I kind of feel
bad about. What is that? Is that a Queen's Right album? Yeah,
maybe we'll just talk about that later when it's appropriate.
What the Queen's Right album? No, the fm R I
blunder that we've been making for thirteen years. Sure, I
(01:10):
feel like, okay, all right, we'll go over that. Fine, Fine, Fine,
I don't want to miss anything. But instead we're gonna
mostly talk about the m R I the Wonder Machine
as it is, because Chuck, we were always just amazed
by it to begin with, but now that I understand it,
I feel even more amazed by it. I'm I'm proud
of humanity for having come up with this thing. Yeah,
I mean, it's pretty amazing that. And we'll talk about
(01:32):
the history of it and everything in a sect, but
it's amazing that human beings uh got together with their
cohorts and said, you know what we can do. The
human body is made up of sixty six water, So
let's figure out how to use magnetic fields and radio
waves to measure that water, uh and the tissues of
(01:56):
our body, and then we can map it and then
we can image it. Right. And so those initial people
who said that were burned at the steak because it
was like the sixteenth century still. But when a few
more hundred years passed, a few new people came onto
the scene, and they encountered a completely different environment um,
one that was kind of nurturing of science and advancement
(02:18):
in the idea that you could see inside the human
body without cutting it open. And the person who won
what actually kind of interestingly turned out to be a
race among researchers who were um all trying to sell
solve the same problem at the same time. Independently was
a guy named Dr Raymond Domadian or damedian Um, and
(02:40):
he is credited as the first person to invent the
fully functional human sized m R. But he's one of
typically at least three people who are credited with with
inventing the m R I, if that makes sense. Yeah,
I mean when he got in there in July of
nineteen seventy seven and nothing really happened, and I think
(03:02):
one of his colleagues said, hey, maybe you're too big
for this thing. They put in a smaller person and
it worked for the first time. It took about five
hours to get an image. Uh. They named the thing Indomitable,
and if you look up pictures, it's in the Smithsonian
now of Indomitable. You know. It's it's one of these
things that looks like a bare bones version of what
(03:24):
it ended up looking like. It's like the the MRI
I version of a wicker wheelchair. All be sort of
did you you didn't see a picture? No, because I
suspected as much. I didn't want it to haunt my dreams. Yeah,
I mean it looks sort of like this big donut.
I think the difference in this one is that it
shows and it may I'm not sure if it's doctor
Demadian in the photo or not, but they're actually wearing
(03:47):
some coils around their body. Um, but there is a
larger donut as well. Do they look like they're on
craft work tour? Sort of? Sort of? So they were
to other people. Demandian was the first one. I'm glad
that we settled on a pronunciation, by the way, um,
and he was the first one to cross the finish line.
(04:09):
But there were the two others who were working on
that same problem, Paul Lauderbergh and Sir Peter Mansfield. And
like I was saying, they were all working independently on
this problem. This thing that had been demonstrated in called
nuclear magnetic residence, which which is that you can make
Adams do really peculiar things when you put them in
(04:31):
the presence of um, a magnetic field. If it's strong enough,
it kind of snaps them all into attention. Uh. They
click their heels and they say, yes, sir, I'll get
that pette for you immediately. And um, that's not how
they normally behave. And so these guys Demardian, Lauderboro, and
Mansfield all were like, somehow, some way, there's a way
(04:52):
to use this, to to use this nuclear magnetic residence
to look inside of the body. And that's what they
said about try to do. Yeah, and pretty early on
they cut the word nuclear out of it and went
with imaging. So m R. I was born. I think
it wasn't probably a great time, and maybe it's never
a great time to throw the word nuclear into anything. Uh.
(05:15):
You know, every everything from nuclear power to nuclear bombs
have a bad rap quite frankly. Yeah, it gets even
worse if you pronounce any nu oh man. Uh. And
then there was someone else we do need to shout out,
a physicist by the name of uh cig Ogawa or Ogawa.
How would you pronounce that it's any value? See in
(05:39):
Japan just screams to be pronounced independently. Oh really they
love so C C G E SAG. That's what I
would go with. Okay, I'm serious, I really think you know,
I believe it just sounded funny. Um. And so what happened,
Uh So while we're shouting this person out is because
they discovered the if you have oxygen poor hemoglobin, it's
(06:02):
gonna react differently by this magnetic field that's created in
the m r I machine than really good oxygen rich hemoglobin,
and that that contrast, you could basically eventually end up
seeing blood flow, like imaging blood flow. Yeah, because with
Demai and his cohort were doing, we're imaging tissues inside
(06:22):
of the body. Um Ogawa said, well, actually you can
track the flow of blood in those tissues as well.
Laid the groundwork for what became f m r I
functional MRI I, and then also more importantly magnetic resonance
and geography, which is basically tracking blood flow in blood
vessels in real time. Basically, Yeah, and all this stuff
(06:44):
was revolutionary because a, um, you really nail it on
the head earlier, like you don't have to cut people
open anymore to see this stuff. Um. We we've had
X rays for a long time and they're great if
you want to look at certain things like your your
bones and see if you've got a cracked rib or something.
But when it comes to soft tissue, X rays were useless.
(07:05):
We'll talk a little bit more about CT can CT
scans and why they're awesome in their own way. But
not still not as I guess functional as an m
r I. Well plus CT scans. I didn't realize this.
Ct s computed tomography. They use X rays as well,
so you're still getting that dose of radiation from a
(07:26):
CT scan too, all right. So all that is just
to lead up to say that the m R I
just beats them all those other machines stink. It truly
earns his nickname the Wonder Machine. Um boy, I feel
like like we should take a break before diving into
this thing, should we? I'm thinking, hold on, yeah, I
think this is a good spot for a break. Okay,
let's do it. Okay, so we're back and uh, a
(08:20):
bit of an early break, but that's because we're about
to get in the weeds with the actual nuts and bolts. Ironically,
probably doesn't have any nuts and bolts. Oh that's a
good point. It's probably probably what heavy duty plastic ribbons.
I don't know. It might just be like large solid
injection molded pieces. That's a good question. We should have
(08:41):
learned that. But anyway, the metaphorical nuts and bolts of
this thing, Uh, if you've ever seen when they look
like a big doughnut, you sit on a a little
you know, it looks like a mortuary tray and you
get slid in through this hole in this tube. It's
only about is in diameter. So they're not great if
(09:03):
you are claustrophobic. But they do make machines that aren't
quite They don't give you quite what you want with
a closed system, but they're a little more opened up. Yeah,
and I got the impression that they're starting to really
kind of revisit those because you can't produce quite as
as great a magnetic field is powerful a magnetic field
with an open system, But I think they're starting to
(09:23):
figure out you don't necessarily need the most powerful magnetic field,
so stay tuned for that in ten years. But um,
the most important part of the whole m r I
machine obviously is the magnet. That's what produces the magic.
Is this magnetic field that so that doughnut, that elongated
doughnut that you're slid into in the tube, that is
(09:47):
the magnet basically, And it's not like a magnet like
you'd put on your fridge. It would suck your fridge
into what amounts to a black hole basically, if you
got your fridge anywhere near this thing. It's a different
kind of magnet. It's a super conducting magnet made up
of coils, probably copper coils that an electrical current is
(10:07):
run through. And when you run an electrical current through
a coiled um set of metal, you can produce a
magnetic field that's great, like fantastic. But to produce the
kinds of like the powerful magnetic fields that they're producing
in an m r I, you actually need a super
conducting magnet, and that's just a whole another level. Yeah.
(10:31):
I mean, if you want to create a very large
and stable field, and we're talking, I think they measure
magnets and is it or gauze. I think goss g
A U S S so goss is the measurement. One
tesla is ten thousand goths. So if you're looking at
(10:53):
just a regular fly by night MRI I wonder machine,
you're looking at about one point five roughly one point
five tesla, or about fifteen thousand goths as far as
the magnetic field goes. And that's um compared to a
point five for the magnetic field of planet Earth. You're
not point five tesla point five goths thousands, it's like
(11:17):
fifty sixty thousand times more if you're an average machine.
But they even make him go all the way up
to ten tesla, Yeah, which is what a hundred thousand goths. Yeah.
And the more goss, the more uh, the prettier machine
is just getting the prettier pictures are. Yeah. Another thing
that I saw though, is that they're figuring out that
(11:38):
when you get past a certain tesla of magnetic field,
it does matter, and that it actually gets worse because
you're picking up so much detail that you can't tell
a bit from a bob basically, and if you're a
radiologist using terms like bits and bobs, you need to
get out of the field and make room for somebody
who takes the job a little more seriously. That's interesting.
(12:00):
I wonder if that also goes hand in hand with
the open machines and them saying like, we don't need
as much goss as we thought we did. I think
it does. I think they're figuring out ways to get
better resolution off lower power, because not only is it
really expensive, I think it's a new machine costs about
a million dollars per tesla it produces. So if you've
(12:21):
got a ten ten tesla machine, which really at this point,
from what I understand, is just showing off as a
medical center. Um, you just spent ten million dollars on
this one m r I machine in your medical center. Um.
But that also it costs a lot of money to
run one of these things because to keep this stable
magnetic field going, you gotta run a lot of electricity
(12:44):
through it. And that's where the super conductivity comes in. Yeah,
I mean you want two rids. I mean you've got
to have like zero resistance running through those wires. And
they do this and I remember we talked about this
in our Are we running out of Helium? I can't
abo what it was called about. We did an episode
on the fact that helium um was in short supply.
(13:05):
And one of the downsides of this, it wasn't just
birthday balloons, was the fact that they use helium liquid
helium to uh to make these copper coils super conductive
and I think at the order of about four hundred
and fifty two degrees below zero. So without that helium,
they don't know if they're looking at alternatives or if
(13:28):
there's a Plan B or not, but they need helium. Well,
remember in our Macy's Thanksgiving day preative. So I don't
know if it made it in there or not, but
they they found like a helium supply that basically like
and Macy's bought it that basically like expanded our supply
of helium by some infinite amounts. So we're like flush
with helium. That's true. I remember that. So so I
(13:49):
think we're okay. So we can just the cam was
kicked down the road, Chuck. We don't need to worry
about that. Yeah, we don't need a plan for the future,
like Y two K right, it's exactly right. Nice, nice
call out. All right, So you've got your big magnet um.
You you also have gradient magnets. You have three gradient magnets,
and those are not nearly as on the magnitude of
(14:12):
that the big daddy. These are about one eighty to
two seventy GAUSS. And your main magnet is what's creating
that main magnetic field that we're gonna go over in
detail in the second, the real stable one. But the
other magnets create the variable field, which you know, that's
what you need to run it um against the other
(14:32):
one to make those images happen. Yeah, that's the that's
basically what you use, like to direct the UM beam
essentially as it were like if you need a shoulder
looked at, it would be then a different location than
your knee. Yeah yeah, And you would say, well, actually
I needed a little to the left, and you would
use these gradient magnets to move the magnetic field. And
(14:54):
what you're really moving from what I understand with the
gradient magnets is a radio free quency pulse. And this
is this is where things this is where it all
comes together. You're you're using three different things. Right, You've
got the magnet and when you when you put um hydrogen,
when you put a body, well, we're not quite there yet,
(15:15):
I'll oh you want me to do it now? Well,
I mean it certainly was anticipation on my part. Okay,
all right, I won't let you down, Chuck. So when
you go into the m R I bore and you
enter this magnetic field the tube, I don't think we've
mentioned that true. Um, When you go in the tube
(15:37):
and you enter the magnetic field, the atoms in your
body UM have what's called the magnetic moment, which means
that they respond to very strong magnetic fields by abandoning
their kind of random spin along their access their procession
and snapping in line along the polar ends of the
(16:00):
magnetic field. And in the m r I that that's
running lengthwise down the middle. So if you're laying on
your back in an m R I tube, the magnetic
field is going from your feet to your head, and
that magnetic field causes the atoms in your body or
the particles in your body that make up atoms, to
snap into line with that polarity. So all of a sudden,
(16:22):
you have protons in this case, as far as the
m R is concerned, hydrogen protons um suddenly going from
random spins to all facing your feet are all spinning
towards your head, one or the other, but technically along
the same line. Yeah, So some of those are and
I think in the biz they call it aligning parallel
(16:43):
or anti parallel, and they sort of cancel each other out,
but there's always going to be more parallel aligned hydrogen atoms,
and those are the ones that uh, we're using to
measure the m R I basically, like everything else, just
sort of can't as each other out, and those leftover
ones and it sounds, you know, there's there's so many
(17:06):
that you can have the cancelation of many and it
still works. So I only saw this in the House
to Works article. Everywhere else I saw basically made no
mention of the fact that, like whether they were aligned
towards your feet or towards your head, like that that mattered,
and that you were focusing on the ones that hadn't aligned,
(17:26):
like I only saw it in this article. Oh you did, okay?
So then kids Science, what is what? They were all
based off this House of Works article? No? No, you
could tell they were original? What is I was just teasing,
you know, I love kids science websites. Chuck which when
this one was? But it was a good one. Um, okay.
(17:47):
So regardless of what which adams you're focusing on, either
the ones that are polarized from along the magnetic field
are the ones that haven't been polarized. That's that polarity
is being created by the main magnet, the superconducting magnet
that has basically zero resistance because it's bathed in liquid
helium and cool to just astounding temperatures. Right now, when
(18:12):
you bring in the radio frequency pulse, which is oscillating,
it's turning on and off very very quickly. What what
was discovered over the last century or so before m
RIS wherever even developed. But what forms the basis of
the principle that mrs operate on is that if you
apply a radio frequency to a bunch of um of
(18:33):
hydrogen protons undergoing their magnetic moment, you can actually adjust
the way that they're aligned. You're kind of like pushing
or pulling them out of alignment, and they're kind of
struggling against it, but you can you can overcome that
with the radio frequency pulse. And so that's basically step
(18:54):
one of the m R I is getting them knocked
out of that polarity so that you can turn that
off and basically gauge and measure them as they snap
back into that polarity. Yeah, and that radio frequency pulse
it has to be the same frequency of those spinning protons,
so if not, they're not going to be in resonance.
(19:15):
That's where the word resonance comes from. If they have
that same frequency, they can exchange energy with one another
and they're on resonance with one another, and when they
turn it on and off, like you said, there's a
moment where they snap back into snap back to attention essentially,
and it takes a little bit of time and a
little bit of energy, and that energy is what they're
(19:39):
basically trying to measure, like that, that movement. Yeah, and
because the protons, the hydrogen protons. The reason they selected
hydrogen protons is because it's so abundant throughout the body. Uh,
it's far and away the most abundant atom in the
body is hydrogen. Um. That that you're going to find
(20:00):
in every bit, every every nook and cranny of your body.
That's another term radiologist should stay away from, but we
can use it. The nooks and crannies of your body
all are filled with hydrogen protons. So um, they know
that a hydrogen proton and like fat, tissue is going
to snap back into place and then release energy at
(20:22):
a slightly different frequency and at a slightly different rate
than the hydrogen protons making up water in the body
or bone in the body or you know, your hair
on your shoulders or whatever. All all of this stuff
is going to just be just slightly different. And they
basically know what the data that comes back, what it's
telling them is, Oh, hey, i'm a I'm a fat
(20:44):
I'm in a bunch of fat over here. I'm into
water over here, I'm shoulder hair over here. And this
is the data that gets transmitted to the computer that's
measured by the computer that's running the MR. Yeah, and
that energy burst that it emits, it's at a very
specific frequency named the lar More frequency after an Irish
(21:06):
physicist named Sir Joseph Larmore. He discovered this all the
way back in and you will never need to know
this information, but just in case you want to know,
the lar More frequency for hydrogen in this case is
forty two point five eight mega hurts per tesla of
magnetic force. That's a I don't even know if that's
(21:29):
like a cocktail that that's not even a Jeopardy question.
That's a dark little pet you keep in your pocket
that you pull out and like stroke every once in
a while. Just reassure yourself that you're very smart. Yeah,
like LaVar Burton should be. LaVar Burton would ask that
question on Jeopardy and Ken Jennings would say, you gotta
be kidding me. Nobody cares love, so you're you're pulling
(21:53):
for LaVar. He's not gonna make it. I mean the
other guy that somehow the executive producer of the show
is of naming himself. Yeah, I mean he said that
he didn't make the call, but us, I don't know, man,
he I thought LaVar Burton was great and would be
great for that show. I'm part of team George Stefanopolis.
Did he guess yeah? Or Aaron Rodgers. He did a
(22:17):
good job. I didn't see that one, but he still
got more football to play. I'm with you, though, I
think LaVar Burton would be wonderful, and from what I read,
he really wants it too. So I just don't get it.
And a lot of people are mad already, so I'm
not so so the decision has been made. It's the
executive producer. Now. They said that they're in the final negotiations.
And you know, now there are some people pointing to
(22:39):
his past, because this guy's a experienced game show executive producer,
and they're like, yeah, when you were on the Prices, right,
you did some not so great things, and so we'll
see what happens. I don't know, what a dusty old crotch. Oh,
I don't know. We'll see what happens. Let's bring humility back, everybody.
(23:00):
Just this and the small doses is fine. That's right.
And this has been game show, so Chuck and Josh
and speaking of go listen to our live game shows
episode I think from Denver. That was really good. Uh
do we do one on game shows? Oh? My, yes
we did. That's a good one. All right. So where
(23:22):
are we? We are at the lar more frequency. I
guess the one thing we need to mention to you
talked earlier about the gradient magnets UM being applied to
very specific parts of the body. In the biz, they
call those areas slices. So you can just get us
if they if you hear someone and if you're going
to get an m R and you're nervous and they
say get a slice of the shoulder. There, you're not
(23:46):
getting a slice. The whole point is that of an
m R is that you don't get sliced. Yes. And
one of the other advantages is that because you can
move these gradient magnets all over the place at all
different planes UM, you can get all sorts of different
views of the same area top, bottom, side, underside, all
the sides. And that's a huge, huge advantage that m
(24:08):
R I offers again without spilling a single drop of blood. Yeah,
and I guess. The final piece of the puzzle here
is this is all well and good that this little
magic machine works like this, but you still have to
be able to have a doctor look at a picture
of this stuff. The imaging part of m R I
is just as important as the rest, because that's what
(24:30):
they need to assess your situation. And they do this
through the magic of computers and math. And I think
that's it. That's that right. We don't have to go
anymore into it than that. I mean, you know, I
don't fully understand it to you. It makes it the
image and turns it to a mathematical formula. Fifty people
(24:54):
on the planet who fully understand how happens. All I
know is there's a really expensive computer attached, and it's
the one that converts all that data into a two
D or three D image. That's all you need to know, really, yeah, um,
And then it ends up in the hands of a
radiologist who basically says, oh, it's this, Oh it's a
donkey that kind of thing, or increasingly in the hands
(25:18):
of AI, which has gotten really really good at reading
radiological charts, including m R I, is to look for
weird anomalies because one of the great advantages of an
m r I is those images that produces um really
can resolve water in the body. And one of the
(25:38):
reasons that's important is because when you start to suffer disease,
one of the one of the almost universal symptoms of
any kind of disease, malady, or disorder in the human
body is an increase in the amount of water. The
thing is is like, the m r I is going
to show you that, but you or I can't see that.
You got to go to school for many, many years
and become a radiologists say that's that's just a little
(26:01):
fluid build up, or oh that's a tumor. It's tough
to distinguish. It needs a human or again an AI
to make that distinction. But the m r I is
going to give you the picture that will show you
that thing that a radiologist could look at and say
that's water, that's a tumor. That's right, pretty neat stuff.
Like we said all along the Wonder Machine, that's right.
(26:23):
And that feels like a great time for break number two.
And when we come back, we'll talk a little bit
about our fm r I. Shame that I feel that
you're not even aware of Oh gosh, right after that,
prepare for our shame, all right, Chuck? Why should we
(27:09):
be ashamed? Because I think I I remember things differently
than you do. That's what I think it is. So
here's the deal with f m R I functioning m
r I s. They track blood flow and what they've
long done in UH psychiatry and neurology since this has
(27:31):
been invented, and we've talked about this a lot on
the podcast. It they will do an f m R
I of your brain and they will show you pictures
of certain things or have you react to certain stimuli,
can be an object or a word that they say
out loud or whatever, and they see where that blood
flow is going in the brain with the idea of like, well, hey,
(27:51):
if you're getting that fresh blood right here in this
part of the brain, that means that that's the part
of your brain that is reacting to the stimulus. And
and the more I read about it, the more it
seemed like that's a pretty good guess. And we don't
really know what's going on with the neurons. This is
just seeing what's lighting up. And I think where I
feel bad as many many times over the years we've said,
(28:15):
you know, and then they showed him a picture of
this and about a being about a boom. This part
starts lighting up, so case closed, and it's not as
like kind of bulletproof as that I see. This is
where I remember differently. We've trashed that idea multiple times
over there. Did yeah, okay, totally. I remember specifically talking
about one study where a guy put like a dead
(28:36):
salmon in an m r I and then wrote a
paper about what it must have been experiencing because some
vauxells showed lit up. Really, so we made good as
we went along. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, okay, totally. We
sniffed that stuff out. We've been sniffing that stuff off
the case since oh eight, oh man, all right, well,
I don't feel bad anymore, No, don't, don't. We definitely
trashed that over the years, and and it's it's worth
(28:58):
being trashed in that somebody figured out, like, you can
use this to a certain degree and yes, you can see,
oh this region's lighting up. But what they quickly found
is that a region of the brain has hundreds or
thousands or countless numbers of neurons involved in that area,
(29:18):
and they're not all just doing the same thing, they're
all performing different functions, they're all connected in different ways.
And until we can get our resolution down on basically
the individual neural level, the point, there's zero point almost
in putting someone in an fMRI I um and and
showing them pictures of of whatever and seeing how they're
(29:41):
stimulated it, because it's all just guesswork somebody. Compared to
to phrenology modern phrenology, you're just extrapolating huge things from
very limited findings. And so we've figured that out very
early on. Like that's been a long standing criticism, and
we we definitely dialed into that better than everything about
our efforts. I'm I'm so glad, thank you for correcting that.
(30:04):
Although one good thing about f m r I is
is that and giography where you can track blood flow
outside of the brain and extrapolated beyond you know, social
psychology studies. Yeah, if if a social psychology study could
even get enough funding to pay for an m r
I rental. We we had some social psychologists and husbands
(30:26):
and wives of social psychologists the right end, and they
were kind of mad at it at you. I think
they're mad again. Uh, you know you should not be
mad at are the inventors of the m r I
because these things are really pretty safe. Um, you are
not being exposed to radiation, and that's a great thing.
You There have been not many incidences of mishaps with
(30:52):
an m r I machine. One of the dangers of
an m r I is, obviously, you know with the
super magnet is going to be metal. If you've ever
had one, they're gonna ask you and ask you several
more times. If you have any metal on your body.
You're not gonna go in there with the ear rings.
You're not going to go in there with even certain
kinds of makeup has metal in it. Uh. If you
(31:15):
have a pacemaker or aneurism clips in your brain, or
if you're like me, dental implants, you're gonna want to
talk to them about that. And uh, because some of
that stuff is still okay. It's not like it will
rip a pacemaker out of your chest, because they're smarter
than that now. But if you have an old pacemaker,
that might be a problem, right Yeah, And even a
(31:36):
new pacemaker can malfunction in the presence of a really
strong madnake field. It won't be ripped from your chest
but it's it might stop working, and that's not good.
You know, you don't want that to happen. But there
are like things like if you have like metal anywhere
on you, it will be pulled out of your pocket.
Your pocket might be pulled right off of your pants basically,
(31:57):
um depending on whether it's one of those externally sewed
pock gets or an internal probably have a gown on anyway, sure,
but you could just be some schmo who likes the
stand around mr I rooms and gained entry. One of
the big problems is the actual medical equipment themselves. There's
medical equipment that is that is has been developed to
(32:20):
be used in an mri I room, and then there's
medical equipment that accidentally finds its way into an m
r I room and ends up getting sucked violently into
the bore, and that is really dangerous. There's there's actually
some astounding pictures on the internet. If you search mri
I catastrophe of there's there's one, and I can't tell
if it's real or not. There's a wheelchair that's sucked
(32:43):
into the boar with feet sticking out from under it.
I didn't see a corroborating story, but people have died
from being hit by objects or pinned to the boar
between a metal object and the boar. UM. And it's
very very rare. It's very infrequent because people running MORI
ees tend to know what to look for and what
questions to ask and what to look out for. But
(33:04):
it has happened, and when it happens, it's got to
be one of the most violent things you could ever Yeah,
about twenty years ago there was a boy who was
killed when an oxygen tank was pulled into the bore.
But like you said, that's that's the kind of thing
that makes the news of the world over because it's
so rare. I think every year there are millions and
(33:25):
millions of m r I scans in the United States alone,
and the FDA gets about three hundred adverse event reports annually,
and most of these are like my skin burned, some
because it got really hot. Um. Because I don't think
we mentioned like the m r I s I've had
have been very brief, just a few minutes. Um. You
(33:48):
can be in there for like an hour or an
hour and a half and you have to lay completely still.
And this the sound that they make is just it's unnerving.
It's this it's like this digital clanging and there are
clacksons and buzzers and it's just not I remember I
talked about it years ago on the show when I
had my first one. Um, it's it's not a relaxing
(34:10):
scene at all. It's a little unnerving, even though you
know it's safe just because of the noise. So um
but but it's it is safe, like accidents usually don't happen. Yeah,
that noise, I forgot you had one before. From what
I understand, that noise is relative to the the tesla's
(34:32):
that the made magnet puts out because when you put
the UM I guess maybe the gradient magnets in there,
they respond to that made magnet and that's what produces
that hammering or clacking sound or whatever. And it can
it can get really loud and give you tonitis or
hearing loss, even if they don't give you. Um, you
know your mouffs. Have you still never had one? No?
(34:55):
Let me just drack on wood there? How did yours
turn out? Pretty great? Yeah? I can't even remember what
the first one was for, to be honest, it was
so many years ago. Uh, And then I had one
more recently, Uh, for my for my gut. Oh yeah, yeah,
for my g I. They were looking at my g
(35:17):
I flow, not flow for stuff you're colon blow. They
were looking for diverticula specifically, And so I was in
an m r A machine and that didn't take very long.
And I think they used die for that one. That's
another thing that we didn't mention is I don't think
they always used die as a contrast, but sometimes they do. Yeah,
(35:39):
about a third of them they used die. And the
dye seems to be from what I can tell, the
the the only truly questionable part about the m R
I experience, because when you come out of that magnetic field,
your adams all go back to normal the way they were,
and you know, there's no long term effects. But apparently
the die they use is um made of gandolinium gatolinium,
(36:03):
which is a metallic element, and they collate it so
that your body doesn't like it doesn't stick around your
body actually pee it out, gets processed through your kidneys.
In very rare instances, some people hang onto it and
it can cause a little bit of kidney damage, but
far and away almost everybody passes it. It seems to be.
The question is using die when you give an m
(36:28):
r I to a woman who's pregnant, because the woman
will pee it out, but the little baby in uterus
or in utero um recycles the stuff that comes in there,
so it will just be ingesting and peeing and ingesting
and peeing that gatollinium until it's born. Um, and then
that's not really good for the old kidneys. So apparently, um,
(36:51):
they FDA recommends that you air on the side of
the mother's health, like like it's a if it's a UM,
like a medical emergency, and the that the that requires
an mr for the mom, including die. That the FDA
and apparently the a m A would say just go
ahead and do it, uh and roll the dice. But
if it's not a medical emergency and the woman has
to get an m r I, they would probably avoid
(37:13):
using the diet. Yeah. The die was Yeah, the die was. Um.
That was kind of one of the more interesting parts
because you can feel it cold running through your body. Wow,
which is really interesting. And I got a taste in
my mouth, like this kind of funky taste. Wow, that's
really amazing. Yeah, which is always a little weird. Um,
(37:33):
you mentioned pregnant women though, but kids is another thing.
Uh m R eyes. I think in nine of m
R eyes go to fully grown adults, and kids present
a problem because kids are fidgety obviously, and they're hard
to keep still, and you've got to start over if
you want to get a good picture. So it's it's
kind of been tough, and a lot of times they
(37:55):
have to um aneste size a child to put them
in an MRI machine, which you know, anytime you're going
into anesthesia there's a risk there and people don't like
doing that in general if you don't have to. So
there are some really smart people working on that. I
think a few years ago there was an article about
a Stanford pediatric radiologist name Schreus Vasa na Vasana Walla,
(38:23):
and he was working on basically kind of making Taylor
made m R I machines for kids that are smaller
and a little more open and don't have these huge
bulky coils for their little bodies. That's amazing. What a
great thing to do with your time, you know, I agreed.
I mean, or you could just get on the podcast
and run your mouth. You're right, I think that's a
(38:45):
less good thing. To do with your time. But regardless,
I think the m R I machine is still maybe
even more than ever the wonder machine. Chuck, I agree,
And it's cool to know how it works. And uh,
you know, if you heard this and go in to
get an m R I, it might arm you with
a little knowledge. You can go in there and talk
about what's the what was that number again? The frequency
(39:08):
forty two point five eight meg It hurts per tesla
yea of magnetic field applied. Just go in there start
throwing that around while you have your smartphone in your pocket.
That's right. Hopefully the least if you're about to get
an m R I, this may do you a little
less nervous about it, agreed. Uh. Well, if you want
to know more about m R EYES, just do a
(39:30):
little research or maybe go get one done. Go hit
up your doctor and say how about an m R I.
Let's check it out, and they'll say okay, hop in
I could use the money. Uh. And since I said
I could use the money, obviously it's time for listener mail.
That's right. Before I read this one, I do want
to shout out. We've got quite a few emails on
(39:50):
people who have the weird compulsion to equal out the
crack stepping defeat. Like, I was kind of surprised at
how many people have that same thing going on. And uh,
other people I think I read one of them. Uh
that said he also like to chew and equal on
both sides of his mouth. Quite a few people also
(40:10):
had that, which I don't have. But it's nice to
know that US crack steppers are. I don't know, I
feel united. Yeah, there's a there's a whole cadre of
you guys out there. It turns out, Yeah, we're gonna
take over the world one day. I know. But I'm
gonna call this one from Rodney about reverse osmosis. Hey, guys,
you get did a really nice job on reverse osmosis. Uh.
(40:33):
It can indeed solve the drinking water problem worldwide, as
well as help solve some of the environmental problems in
our industrial processes. You should also do a program on electrolytics.
This technology can take salt and convert it to disinfectants
that are used to treat water and kill microorganisms that
make people sick. Nine thousand people die every day from
(40:55):
water borne disease worldwide. Uh. And this this guy, Rodney
has a couple of companies that deal with this, so
offered us up some technical assistance if we wanted to
do something on that nice, very nice, Thanks a lot, Rodney.
Appreciate that UM offer, and congratulations to you for saving
the world. Agreed. UM. If you want to get in
(41:19):
touch with us like Rodney did, because you're saving the
world or because you UM just want to say hi,
it doesn't matter. We were fine either way. You can
get in touch with us by sending an email to
Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(41:43):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry is with us
as we journey into the heart of the magnetic darkness
known as an m r I machine, the Wonder Machine.
(00:27):
After all these years of talking about this thing, I
finally get it. I know it. It's crazy. We've been
kind of amazed by it and then a little bit
turned off by it. But then we realized it's not
the machine itself, it's the way it's being applied. And
so we kind of came back to it again and
it nuzzled us and it's bore and it got kind
(00:48):
of sexy. Yeah, and we're also guilty of the f
m r I crime that now I kind of feel
bad about. What is that? Is that a Queen's Right album? Yeah,
maybe we'll just talk about that later when it's appropriate.
What the Queen's Right album? No, the fm R I
blunder that we've been making for thirteen years. Sure, I
(01:10):
feel like, okay, all right, we'll go over that. Fine, Fine, Fine,
I don't want to miss anything. But instead we're gonna
mostly talk about the m R I the Wonder Machine
as it is, because Chuck, we were always just amazed
by it to begin with, but now that I understand it,
I feel even more amazed by it. I'm I'm proud
of humanity for having come up with this thing. Yeah,
I mean, it's pretty amazing that. And we'll talk about
(01:32):
the history of it and everything in a sect, but
it's amazing that human beings uh got together with their
cohorts and said, you know what we can do. The
human body is made up of sixty six water, So
let's figure out how to use magnetic fields and radio
waves to measure that water, uh and the tissues of
(01:56):
our body, and then we can map it and then
we can image it. Right. And so those initial people
who said that were burned at the steak because it
was like the sixteenth century still. But when a few
more hundred years passed, a few new people came onto
the scene, and they encountered a completely different environment um,
one that was kind of nurturing of science and advancement
(02:18):
in the idea that you could see inside the human
body without cutting it open. And the person who won
what actually kind of interestingly turned out to be a
race among researchers who were um all trying to sell
solve the same problem at the same time. Independently was
a guy named Dr Raymond Domadian or damedian Um, and
(02:40):
he is credited as the first person to invent the
fully functional human sized m R. But he's one of
typically at least three people who are credited with with
inventing the m R I, if that makes sense. Yeah,
I mean when he got in there in July of
nineteen seventy seven and nothing really happened, and I think
(03:02):
one of his colleagues said, hey, maybe you're too big
for this thing. They put in a smaller person and
it worked for the first time. It took about five
hours to get an image. Uh. They named the thing Indomitable,
and if you look up pictures, it's in the Smithsonian
now of Indomitable. You know. It's it's one of these
things that looks like a bare bones version of what
(03:24):
it ended up looking like. It's like the the MRI
I version of a wicker wheelchair. All be sort of
did you you didn't see a picture? No, because I
suspected as much. I didn't want it to haunt my dreams. Yeah,
I mean it looks sort of like this big donut.
I think the difference in this one is that it
shows and it may I'm not sure if it's doctor
Demadian in the photo or not, but they're actually wearing
(03:47):
some coils around their body. Um, but there is a
larger donut as well. Do they look like they're on
craft work tour? Sort of? Sort of? So they were
to other people. Demandian was the first one. I'm glad
that we settled on a pronunciation, by the way, um,
and he was the first one to cross the finish line.
(04:09):
But there were the two others who were working on
that same problem, Paul Lauderbergh and Sir Peter Mansfield. And
like I was saying, they were all working independently on
this problem. This thing that had been demonstrated in called
nuclear magnetic residence, which which is that you can make
Adams do really peculiar things when you put them in
(04:31):
the presence of um, a magnetic field. If it's strong enough,
it kind of snaps them all into attention. Uh. They
click their heels and they say, yes, sir, I'll get
that pette for you immediately. And um, that's not how
they normally behave. And so these guys Demardian, Lauderboro, and
Mansfield all were like, somehow, some way, there's a way
(04:52):
to use this, to to use this nuclear magnetic residence
to look inside of the body. And that's what they
said about try to do. Yeah, and pretty early on
they cut the word nuclear out of it and went
with imaging. So m R. I was born. I think
it wasn't probably a great time, and maybe it's never
a great time to throw the word nuclear into anything. Uh.
(05:15):
You know, every everything from nuclear power to nuclear bombs
have a bad rap quite frankly. Yeah, it gets even
worse if you pronounce any nu oh man. Uh. And
then there was someone else we do need to shout out,
a physicist by the name of uh cig Ogawa or Ogawa.
How would you pronounce that it's any value? See in
(05:39):
Japan just screams to be pronounced independently. Oh really they
love so C C G E SAG. That's what I
would go with. Okay, I'm serious, I really think you know,
I believe it just sounded funny. Um. And so what happened,
Uh So while we're shouting this person out is because
they discovered the if you have oxygen poor hemoglobin, it's
(06:02):
gonna react differently by this magnetic field that's created in
the m r I machine than really good oxygen rich hemoglobin,
and that that contrast, you could basically eventually end up
seeing blood flow, like imaging blood flow. Yeah, because with
Demai and his cohort were doing, we're imaging tissues inside
(06:22):
of the body. Um Ogawa said, well, actually you can
track the flow of blood in those tissues as well.
Laid the groundwork for what became f m r I
functional MRI I, and then also more importantly magnetic resonance
and geography, which is basically tracking blood flow in blood
vessels in real time. Basically, Yeah, and all this stuff
(06:44):
was revolutionary because a, um, you really nail it on
the head earlier, like you don't have to cut people
open anymore to see this stuff. Um. We we've had
X rays for a long time and they're great if
you want to look at certain things like your your
bones and see if you've got a cracked rib or something.
But when it comes to soft tissue, X rays were useless.
(07:05):
We'll talk a little bit more about CT can CT
scans and why they're awesome in their own way. But
not still not as I guess functional as an m
r I. Well plus CT scans. I didn't realize this.
Ct s computed tomography. They use X rays as well,
so you're still getting that dose of radiation from a
(07:26):
CT scan too, all right. So all that is just
to lead up to say that the m R I
just beats them all those other machines stink. It truly
earns his nickname the Wonder Machine. Um boy, I feel
like like we should take a break before diving into
this thing, should we? I'm thinking, hold on, yeah, I
think this is a good spot for a break. Okay,
let's do it. Okay, so we're back and uh, a
(08:20):
bit of an early break, but that's because we're about
to get in the weeds with the actual nuts and bolts. Ironically,
probably doesn't have any nuts and bolts. Oh that's a
good point. It's probably probably what heavy duty plastic ribbons.
I don't know. It might just be like large solid
injection molded pieces. That's a good question. We should have
(08:41):
learned that. But anyway, the metaphorical nuts and bolts of
this thing, Uh, if you've ever seen when they look
like a big doughnut, you sit on a a little
you know, it looks like a mortuary tray and you
get slid in through this hole in this tube. It's
only about is in diameter. So they're not great if
(09:03):
you are claustrophobic. But they do make machines that aren't
quite They don't give you quite what you want with
a closed system, but they're a little more opened up. Yeah,
and I got the impression that they're starting to really
kind of revisit those because you can't produce quite as
as great a magnetic field is powerful a magnetic field
with an open system, But I think they're starting to
(09:23):
figure out you don't necessarily need the most powerful magnetic field,
so stay tuned for that in ten years. But um,
the most important part of the whole m r I
machine obviously is the magnet. That's what produces the magic.
Is this magnetic field that so that doughnut, that elongated
doughnut that you're slid into in the tube, that is
(09:47):
the magnet basically, And it's not like a magnet like
you'd put on your fridge. It would suck your fridge
into what amounts to a black hole basically, if you
got your fridge anywhere near this thing. It's a different
kind of magnet. It's a super conducting magnet made up
of coils, probably copper coils that an electrical current is
(10:07):
run through. And when you run an electrical current through
a coiled um set of metal, you can produce a
magnetic field that's great, like fantastic. But to produce the
kinds of like the powerful magnetic fields that they're producing
in an m r I, you actually need a super
conducting magnet, and that's just a whole another level. Yeah.
(10:31):
I mean, if you want to create a very large
and stable field, and we're talking, I think they measure
magnets and is it or gauze. I think goss g
A U S S so goss is the measurement. One
tesla is ten thousand goths. So if you're looking at
(10:53):
just a regular fly by night MRI I wonder machine,
you're looking at about one point five roughly one point
five tesla, or about fifteen thousand goths as far as
the magnetic field goes. And that's um compared to a
point five for the magnetic field of planet Earth. You're
not point five tesla point five goths thousands, it's like
(11:17):
fifty sixty thousand times more if you're an average machine.
But they even make him go all the way up
to ten tesla, Yeah, which is what a hundred thousand goths. Yeah.
And the more goss, the more uh, the prettier machine
is just getting the prettier pictures are. Yeah. Another thing
that I saw though, is that they're figuring out that
(11:38):
when you get past a certain tesla of magnetic field,
it does matter, and that it actually gets worse because
you're picking up so much detail that you can't tell
a bit from a bob basically, and if you're a
radiologist using terms like bits and bobs, you need to
get out of the field and make room for somebody
who takes the job a little more seriously. That's interesting.
(12:00):
I wonder if that also goes hand in hand with
the open machines and them saying like, we don't need
as much goss as we thought we did. I think
it does. I think they're figuring out ways to get
better resolution off lower power, because not only is it
really expensive, I think it's a new machine costs about
a million dollars per tesla it produces. So if you've
(12:21):
got a ten ten tesla machine, which really at this point,
from what I understand, is just showing off as a
medical center. Um, you just spent ten million dollars on
this one m r I machine in your medical center. Um.
But that also it costs a lot of money to
run one of these things because to keep this stable
magnetic field going, you gotta run a lot of electricity
(12:44):
through it. And that's where the super conductivity comes in. Yeah,
I mean you want two rids. I mean you've got
to have like zero resistance running through those wires. And
they do this and I remember we talked about this
in our Are we running out of Helium? I can't
abo what it was called about. We did an episode
on the fact that helium um was in short supply.
(13:05):
And one of the downsides of this, it wasn't just
birthday balloons, was the fact that they use helium liquid
helium to uh to make these copper coils super conductive
and I think at the order of about four hundred
and fifty two degrees below zero. So without that helium,
they don't know if they're looking at alternatives or if
(13:28):
there's a Plan B or not, but they need helium. Well,
remember in our Macy's Thanksgiving day preative. So I don't
know if it made it in there or not, but
they they found like a helium supply that basically like
and Macy's bought it that basically like expanded our supply
of helium by some infinite amounts. So we're like flush
with helium. That's true. I remember that. So so I
(13:49):
think we're okay. So we can just the cam was
kicked down the road, Chuck. We don't need to worry
about that. Yeah, we don't need a plan for the future,
like Y two K right, it's exactly right. Nice, nice
call out. All right, So you've got your big magnet um.
You you also have gradient magnets. You have three gradient magnets,
and those are not nearly as on the magnitude of
(14:12):
that the big daddy. These are about one eighty to
two seventy GAUSS. And your main magnet is what's creating
that main magnetic field that we're gonna go over in
detail in the second, the real stable one. But the
other magnets create the variable field, which you know, that's
what you need to run it um against the other
(14:32):
one to make those images happen. Yeah, that's the that's
basically what you use, like to direct the UM beam
essentially as it were like if you need a shoulder
looked at, it would be then a different location than
your knee. Yeah yeah, And you would say, well, actually
I needed a little to the left, and you would
use these gradient magnets to move the magnetic field. And
(14:54):
what you're really moving from what I understand with the
gradient magnets is a radio free quency pulse. And this
is this is where things this is where it all
comes together. You're you're using three different things. Right, You've
got the magnet and when you when you put um hydrogen,
when you put a body, well, we're not quite there yet,
(15:15):
I'll oh you want me to do it now? Well,
I mean it certainly was anticipation on my part. Okay,
all right, I won't let you down, Chuck. So when
you go into the m R I bore and you
enter this magnetic field the tube, I don't think we've
mentioned that true. Um, When you go in the tube
(15:37):
and you enter the magnetic field, the atoms in your
body UM have what's called the magnetic moment, which means
that they respond to very strong magnetic fields by abandoning
their kind of random spin along their access their procession
and snapping in line along the polar ends of the
(16:00):
magnetic field. And in the m r I that that's
running lengthwise down the middle. So if you're laying on
your back in an m R I tube, the magnetic
field is going from your feet to your head, and
that magnetic field causes the atoms in your body or
the particles in your body that make up atoms, to
snap into line with that polarity. So all of a sudden,
(16:22):
you have protons in this case, as far as the
m R is concerned, hydrogen protons um suddenly going from
random spins to all facing your feet are all spinning
towards your head, one or the other, but technically along
the same line. Yeah, So some of those are and
I think in the biz they call it aligning parallel
(16:43):
or anti parallel, and they sort of cancel each other out,
but there's always going to be more parallel aligned hydrogen atoms,
and those are the ones that uh, we're using to
measure the m R I basically, like everything else, just
sort of can't as each other out, and those leftover
ones and it sounds, you know, there's there's so many
(17:06):
that you can have the cancelation of many and it
still works. So I only saw this in the House
to Works article. Everywhere else I saw basically made no
mention of the fact that, like whether they were aligned
towards your feet or towards your head, like that that mattered,
and that you were focusing on the ones that hadn't aligned,
(17:26):
like I only saw it in this article. Oh you did, okay?
So then kids Science, what is what? They were all
based off this House of Works article? No? No, you
could tell they were original? What is I was just teasing,
you know, I love kids science websites. Chuck which when
this one was? But it was a good one. Um, okay.
(17:47):
So regardless of what which adams you're focusing on, either
the ones that are polarized from along the magnetic field
are the ones that haven't been polarized. That's that polarity
is being created by the main magnet, the superconducting magnet
that has basically zero resistance because it's bathed in liquid
helium and cool to just astounding temperatures. Right now, when
(18:12):
you bring in the radio frequency pulse, which is oscillating,
it's turning on and off very very quickly. What what
was discovered over the last century or so before m
RIS wherever even developed. But what forms the basis of
the principle that mrs operate on is that if you
apply a radio frequency to a bunch of um of
(18:33):
hydrogen protons undergoing their magnetic moment, you can actually adjust
the way that they're aligned. You're kind of like pushing
or pulling them out of alignment, and they're kind of
struggling against it, but you can you can overcome that
with the radio frequency pulse. And so that's basically step
(18:54):
one of the m R I is getting them knocked
out of that polarity so that you can turn that
off and basically gauge and measure them as they snap
back into that polarity. Yeah, and that radio frequency pulse
it has to be the same frequency of those spinning protons,
so if not, they're not going to be in resonance.
(19:15):
That's where the word resonance comes from. If they have
that same frequency, they can exchange energy with one another
and they're on resonance with one another, and when they
turn it on and off, like you said, there's a
moment where they snap back into snap back to attention essentially,
and it takes a little bit of time and a
little bit of energy, and that energy is what they're
(19:39):
basically trying to measure, like that, that movement. Yeah, and
because the protons, the hydrogen protons. The reason they selected
hydrogen protons is because it's so abundant throughout the body. Uh,
it's far and away the most abundant atom in the
body is hydrogen. Um. That that you're going to find
(20:00):
in every bit, every every nook and cranny of your body.
That's another term radiologist should stay away from, but we
can use it. The nooks and crannies of your body
all are filled with hydrogen protons. So um, they know
that a hydrogen proton and like fat, tissue is going
to snap back into place and then release energy at
(20:22):
a slightly different frequency and at a slightly different rate
than the hydrogen protons making up water in the body
or bone in the body or you know, your hair
on your shoulders or whatever. All all of this stuff
is going to just be just slightly different. And they
basically know what the data that comes back, what it's
telling them is, Oh, hey, i'm a I'm a fat
(20:44):
I'm in a bunch of fat over here. I'm into
water over here, I'm shoulder hair over here. And this
is the data that gets transmitted to the computer that's
measured by the computer that's running the MR. Yeah, and
that energy burst that it emits, it's at a very
specific frequency named the lar More frequency after an Irish
(21:06):
physicist named Sir Joseph Larmore. He discovered this all the
way back in and you will never need to know
this information, but just in case you want to know,
the lar More frequency for hydrogen in this case is
forty two point five eight mega hurts per tesla of
magnetic force. That's a I don't even know if that's
(21:29):
like a cocktail that that's not even a Jeopardy question.
That's a dark little pet you keep in your pocket
that you pull out and like stroke every once in
a while. Just reassure yourself that you're very smart. Yeah,
like LaVar Burton should be. LaVar Burton would ask that
question on Jeopardy and Ken Jennings would say, you gotta
be kidding me. Nobody cares love, so you're you're pulling
(21:53):
for LaVar. He's not gonna make it. I mean the
other guy that somehow the executive producer of the show
is of naming himself. Yeah, I mean he said that
he didn't make the call, but us, I don't know, man,
he I thought LaVar Burton was great and would be
great for that show. I'm part of team George Stefanopolis.
Did he guess yeah? Or Aaron Rodgers. He did a
(22:17):
good job. I didn't see that one, but he still
got more football to play. I'm with you, though, I
think LaVar Burton would be wonderful, and from what I read,
he really wants it too. So I just don't get it.
And a lot of people are mad already, so I'm
not so so the decision has been made. It's the
executive producer. Now. They said that they're in the final negotiations.
And you know, now there are some people pointing to
(22:39):
his past, because this guy's a experienced game show executive producer,
and they're like, yeah, when you were on the Prices, right,
you did some not so great things, and so we'll
see what happens. I don't know, what a dusty old crotch. Oh,
I don't know. We'll see what happens. Let's bring humility back, everybody.
(23:00):
Just this and the small doses is fine. That's right.
And this has been game show, so Chuck and Josh
and speaking of go listen to our live game shows
episode I think from Denver. That was really good. Uh
do we do one on game shows? Oh? My, yes
we did. That's a good one. All right. So where
(23:22):
are we? We are at the lar more frequency. I
guess the one thing we need to mention to you
talked earlier about the gradient magnets UM being applied to
very specific parts of the body. In the biz, they
call those areas slices. So you can just get us
if they if you hear someone and if you're going
to get an m R and you're nervous and they
say get a slice of the shoulder. There, you're not
(23:46):
getting a slice. The whole point is that of an
m R is that you don't get sliced. Yes. And
one of the other advantages is that because you can
move these gradient magnets all over the place at all
different planes UM, you can get all sorts of different
views of the same area top, bottom, side, underside, all
the sides. And that's a huge, huge advantage that m
(24:08):
R I offers again without spilling a single drop of blood. Yeah,
and I guess. The final piece of the puzzle here
is this is all well and good that this little
magic machine works like this, but you still have to
be able to have a doctor look at a picture
of this stuff. The imaging part of m R I
is just as important as the rest, because that's what
(24:30):
they need to assess your situation. And they do this
through the magic of computers and math. And I think
that's it. That's that right. We don't have to go
anymore into it than that. I mean, you know, I
don't fully understand it to you. It makes it the
image and turns it to a mathematical formula. Fifty people
(24:54):
on the planet who fully understand how happens. All I
know is there's a really expensive computer attached, and it's
the one that converts all that data into a two
D or three D image. That's all you need to know, really, yeah, um,
And then it ends up in the hands of a
radiologist who basically says, oh, it's this, Oh it's a
donkey that kind of thing, or increasingly in the hands
(25:18):
of AI, which has gotten really really good at reading
radiological charts, including m R I, is to look for
weird anomalies because one of the great advantages of an
m r I is those images that produces um really
can resolve water in the body. And one of the
(25:38):
reasons that's important is because when you start to suffer disease,
one of the one of the almost universal symptoms of
any kind of disease, malady, or disorder in the human
body is an increase in the amount of water. The
thing is is like, the m r I is going
to show you that, but you or I can't see that.
You got to go to school for many, many years
and become a radiologists say that's that's just a little
(26:01):
fluid build up, or oh that's a tumor. It's tough
to distinguish. It needs a human or again an AI
to make that distinction. But the m r I is
going to give you the picture that will show you
that thing that a radiologist could look at and say
that's water, that's a tumor. That's right, pretty neat stuff.
Like we said all along the Wonder Machine, that's right.
(26:23):
And that feels like a great time for break number two.
And when we come back, we'll talk a little bit
about our fm r I. Shame that I feel that
you're not even aware of Oh gosh, right after that,
prepare for our shame, all right, Chuck? Why should we
(27:09):
be ashamed? Because I think I I remember things differently
than you do. That's what I think it is. So
here's the deal with f m R I functioning m
r I s. They track blood flow and what they've
long done in UH psychiatry and neurology since this has
(27:31):
been invented, and we've talked about this a lot on
the podcast. It they will do an f m R
I of your brain and they will show you pictures
of certain things or have you react to certain stimuli,
can be an object or a word that they say
out loud or whatever, and they see where that blood
flow is going in the brain with the idea of like, well, hey,
(27:51):
if you're getting that fresh blood right here in this
part of the brain, that means that that's the part
of your brain that is reacting to the stimulus. And
and the more I read about it, the more it
seemed like that's a pretty good guess. And we don't
really know what's going on with the neurons. This is
just seeing what's lighting up. And I think where I
feel bad as many many times over the years we've said,
(28:15):
you know, and then they showed him a picture of
this and about a being about a boom. This part
starts lighting up, so case closed, and it's not as
like kind of bulletproof as that I see. This is
where I remember differently. We've trashed that idea multiple times
over there. Did yeah, okay, totally. I remember specifically talking
about one study where a guy put like a dead
(28:36):
salmon in an m r I and then wrote a
paper about what it must have been experiencing because some
vauxells showed lit up. Really, so we made good as
we went along. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, okay, totally. We
sniffed that stuff out. We've been sniffing that stuff off
the case since oh eight, oh man, all right, well,
I don't feel bad anymore, No, don't, don't. We definitely
trashed that over the years, and and it's it's worth
(28:58):
being trashed in that somebody figured out, like, you can
use this to a certain degree and yes, you can see,
oh this region's lighting up. But what they quickly found
is that a region of the brain has hundreds or
thousands or countless numbers of neurons involved in that area,
(29:18):
and they're not all just doing the same thing, they're
all performing different functions, they're all connected in different ways.
And until we can get our resolution down on basically
the individual neural level, the point, there's zero point almost
in putting someone in an fMRI I um and and
showing them pictures of of whatever and seeing how they're
(29:41):
stimulated it, because it's all just guesswork somebody. Compared to
to phrenology modern phrenology, you're just extrapolating huge things from
very limited findings. And so we've figured that out very
early on. Like that's been a long standing criticism, and
we we definitely dialed into that better than everything about
our efforts. I'm I'm so glad, thank you for correcting that.
(30:04):
Although one good thing about f m r I is
is that and giography where you can track blood flow
outside of the brain and extrapolated beyond you know, social
psychology studies. Yeah, if if a social psychology study could
even get enough funding to pay for an m r
I rental. We we had some social psychologists and husbands
(30:26):
and wives of social psychologists the right end, and they
were kind of mad at it at you. I think
they're mad again. Uh, you know you should not be
mad at are the inventors of the m r I
because these things are really pretty safe. Um, you are
not being exposed to radiation, and that's a great thing.
You There have been not many incidences of mishaps with
(30:52):
an m r I machine. One of the dangers of
an m r I is, obviously, you know with the
super magnet is going to be metal. If you've ever
had one, they're gonna ask you and ask you several
more times. If you have any metal on your body.
You're not gonna go in there with the ear rings.
You're not going to go in there with even certain
kinds of makeup has metal in it. Uh. If you
(31:15):
have a pacemaker or aneurism clips in your brain, or
if you're like me, dental implants, you're gonna want to
talk to them about that. And uh, because some of
that stuff is still okay. It's not like it will
rip a pacemaker out of your chest, because they're smarter
than that now. But if you have an old pacemaker,
that might be a problem, right Yeah, And even a
(31:36):
new pacemaker can malfunction in the presence of a really
strong madnake field. It won't be ripped from your chest
but it's it might stop working, and that's not good.
You know, you don't want that to happen. But there
are like things like if you have like metal anywhere
on you, it will be pulled out of your pocket.
Your pocket might be pulled right off of your pants basically,
(31:57):
um depending on whether it's one of those externally sewed
pock gets or an internal probably have a gown on anyway, sure,
but you could just be some schmo who likes the
stand around mr I rooms and gained entry. One of
the big problems is the actual medical equipment themselves. There's
medical equipment that is that is has been developed to
(32:20):
be used in an mri I room, and then there's
medical equipment that accidentally finds its way into an m
r I room and ends up getting sucked violently into
the bore, and that is really dangerous. There's there's actually
some astounding pictures on the internet. If you search mri
I catastrophe of there's there's one, and I can't tell
if it's real or not. There's a wheelchair that's sucked
(32:43):
into the boar with feet sticking out from under it.
I didn't see a corroborating story, but people have died
from being hit by objects or pinned to the boar
between a metal object and the boar. UM. And it's
very very rare. It's very infrequent because people running MORI
ees tend to know what to look for and what
questions to ask and what to look out for. But
(33:04):
it has happened, and when it happens, it's got to
be one of the most violent things you could ever Yeah,
about twenty years ago there was a boy who was
killed when an oxygen tank was pulled into the bore.
But like you said, that's that's the kind of thing
that makes the news of the world over because it's
so rare. I think every year there are millions and
(33:25):
millions of m r I scans in the United States alone,
and the FDA gets about three hundred adverse event reports annually,
and most of these are like my skin burned, some
because it got really hot. Um. Because I don't think
we mentioned like the m r I s I've had
have been very brief, just a few minutes. Um. You
(33:48):
can be in there for like an hour or an
hour and a half and you have to lay completely still.
And this the sound that they make is just it's unnerving.
It's this it's like this digital clanging and there are
clacksons and buzzers and it's just not I remember I
talked about it years ago on the show when I
had my first one. Um, it's it's not a relaxing
(34:10):
scene at all. It's a little unnerving, even though you
know it's safe just because of the noise. So um
but but it's it is safe, like accidents usually don't happen. Yeah,
that noise, I forgot you had one before. From what
I understand, that noise is relative to the the tesla's
(34:32):
that the made magnet puts out because when you put
the UM I guess maybe the gradient magnets in there,
they respond to that made magnet and that's what produces
that hammering or clacking sound or whatever. And it can
it can get really loud and give you tonitis or
hearing loss, even if they don't give you. Um, you
know your mouffs. Have you still never had one? No?
(34:55):
Let me just drack on wood there? How did yours
turn out? Pretty great? Yeah? I can't even remember what
the first one was for, to be honest, it was
so many years ago. Uh, And then I had one
more recently, Uh, for my for my gut. Oh yeah, yeah,
for my g I. They were looking at my g
(35:17):
I flow, not flow for stuff you're colon blow. They
were looking for diverticula specifically, And so I was in
an m r A machine and that didn't take very long.
And I think they used die for that one. That's
another thing that we didn't mention is I don't think
they always used die as a contrast, but sometimes they do. Yeah,
(35:39):
about a third of them they used die. And the
dye seems to be from what I can tell, the
the the only truly questionable part about the m R
I experience, because when you come out of that magnetic field,
your adams all go back to normal the way they were,
and you know, there's no long term effects. But apparently
the die they use is um made of gandolinium gatolinium,
(36:03):
which is a metallic element, and they collate it so
that your body doesn't like it doesn't stick around your
body actually pee it out, gets processed through your kidneys.
In very rare instances, some people hang onto it and
it can cause a little bit of kidney damage, but
far and away almost everybody passes it. It seems to be.
The question is using die when you give an m
(36:28):
r I to a woman who's pregnant, because the woman
will pee it out, but the little baby in uterus
or in utero um recycles the stuff that comes in there,
so it will just be ingesting and peeing and ingesting
and peeing that gatollinium until it's born. Um, and then
that's not really good for the old kidneys. So apparently, um,
(36:51):
they FDA recommends that you air on the side of
the mother's health, like like it's a if it's a UM,
like a medical emergency, and the that the that requires
an mr for the mom, including die. That the FDA
and apparently the a m A would say just go
ahead and do it, uh and roll the dice. But
if it's not a medical emergency and the woman has
to get an m r I, they would probably avoid
(37:13):
using the diet. Yeah. The die was Yeah, the die was. Um.
That was kind of one of the more interesting parts
because you can feel it cold running through your body. Wow,
which is really interesting. And I got a taste in
my mouth, like this kind of funky taste. Wow, that's
really amazing. Yeah, which is always a little weird. Um,
(37:33):
you mentioned pregnant women though, but kids is another thing.
Uh m R eyes. I think in nine of m
R eyes go to fully grown adults, and kids present
a problem because kids are fidgety obviously, and they're hard
to keep still, and you've got to start over if
you want to get a good picture. So it's it's
kind of been tough, and a lot of times they
(37:55):
have to um aneste size a child to put them
in an MRI machine, which you know, anytime you're going
into anesthesia there's a risk there and people don't like
doing that in general if you don't have to. So
there are some really smart people working on that. I
think a few years ago there was an article about
a Stanford pediatric radiologist name Schreus Vasa na Vasana Walla,
(38:23):
and he was working on basically kind of making Taylor
made m R I machines for kids that are smaller
and a little more open and don't have these huge
bulky coils for their little bodies. That's amazing. What a
great thing to do with your time, you know, I agreed.
I mean, or you could just get on the podcast
and run your mouth. You're right, I think that's a
(38:45):
less good thing. To do with your time. But regardless,
I think the m R I machine is still maybe
even more than ever the wonder machine. Chuck, I agree,
And it's cool to know how it works. And uh,
you know, if you heard this and go in to
get an m R I, it might arm you with
a little knowledge. You can go in there and talk
about what's the what was that number again? The frequency
(39:08):
forty two point five eight meg It hurts per tesla
yea of magnetic field applied. Just go in there start
throwing that around while you have your smartphone in your pocket.
That's right. Hopefully the least if you're about to get
an m R I, this may do you a little
less nervous about it, agreed. Uh. Well, if you want
to know more about m R EYES, just do a
(39:30):
little research or maybe go get one done. Go hit
up your doctor and say how about an m R I.
Let's check it out, and they'll say okay, hop in
I could use the money. Uh. And since I said
I could use the money, obviously it's time for listener mail.
That's right. Before I read this one, I do want
to shout out. We've got quite a few emails on
(39:50):
people who have the weird compulsion to equal out the
crack stepping defeat. Like, I was kind of surprised at
how many people have that same thing going on. And uh,
other people I think I read one of them. Uh
that said he also like to chew and equal on
both sides of his mouth. Quite a few people also
(40:10):
had that, which I don't have. But it's nice to
know that US crack steppers are. I don't know, I
feel united. Yeah, there's a there's a whole cadre of
you guys out there. It turns out, Yeah, we're gonna
take over the world one day. I know. But I'm
gonna call this one from Rodney about reverse osmosis. Hey, guys,
you get did a really nice job on reverse osmosis. Uh.
(40:33):
It can indeed solve the drinking water problem worldwide, as
well as help solve some of the environmental problems in
our industrial processes. You should also do a program on electrolytics.
This technology can take salt and convert it to disinfectants
that are used to treat water and kill microorganisms that
make people sick. Nine thousand people die every day from
(40:55):
water borne disease worldwide. Uh. And this this guy, Rodney
has a couple of companies that deal with this, so
offered us up some technical assistance if we wanted to
do something on that nice, very nice, Thanks a lot, Rodney.
Appreciate that UM offer, and congratulations to you for saving
the world. Agreed. UM. If you want to get in
(41:19):
touch with us like Rodney did, because you're saving the
world or because you UM just want to say hi,
it doesn't matter. We were fine either way. You can
get in touch with us by sending an email to
Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(41:43):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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