its diagnostic capabilities, neighbors would sometimes protest with
“we don’t want anything nuclear in our neighborhood!” A decision
was quickly made to drop the N and simply refer to the process as
magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. An MRI of the brain can yield
a sharpness of anatomical detail superior to that of a CT. Normal
anatomical structures, as well as lesions, are often readily visible and
quite precisely localizable (Fig. 17.2).
Figure 17.2 MRI of a human brain.
These various methods—x-ray, CT, and MRI—are all ways to gen-
erate static, structural pictures of living human brains. Another set