If you are a patient with Anthem medical insurance, you may have heard about changes to some of the requirements for medical imaging that will occur in 2018. Anthem’s new rules will require that high end outpatient imaging, like MRIs and CTs, for their fully insured patients be provided in a non-hospital setting that does not bill as a hospital.
A CT Scan vs. a PET scan; how do they differ? CT scans and PET scans are actually very different and often serve a different diagnostic purpose. While your doctor will prescribe the scan that most effectively addresses your needs, you might be curious about how they work. Here is a quick guide to help you understand the basics.
The most valuable tool we have in the fight against cancer is early detection. The sooner we can detect it, the more successful we can be in our treatments. That’s why Medical Imaging of Fredericksburg makes use of the most cutting edge imaging technologies, using innovation to save lives. And now, with the addition of the latest PET/CT technology to their facility,
When it comes to your doctor deciding on an MRI vs. CT Scan, it will be based on your medical condition and what your doctor needs to know in order to make a diagnosis or prescribe treatment.
An MRI is done by using a powerful magnetic field combined with radio waves that allow a computer to produce images of the inside of the body.
Diagnostic imaging is the term used to describe all the different ways that physicians are able to look inside your body. A diagnostic imaging center has equipment and trained specialists to perform those tests. A doctor is then able to take the results from the diagnostic tests and draw conclusions from them.
Screening is used by healthy people to look for potential problems.
When Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (the show’s chief medical officer) cared for a sick patient on board the Starship Enterprise, he checked the patient with his scanner in the ship’s sickbay to get a diagnosis instantly. While we aren’t on the Enterprise, advances in medical imaging allow us to receive diagnoses that can seem just as amazing.
Modern medicine has advanced well beyond x-rays. At Medical Imaging of Fredericksburg, we have ultrasounds, mammography, CT scans, several types of MRIs, PET scans, and PET-CT scans. The two most commonly used tests besides x-rays are CT scans and MRIs, both of which provide more detail than x-rays. If you need specialized imaging, it can be helpful to understand the operation and uses for a CT Scan vs.