An ongoing bloat accompanied by a funny feeling in your stomach leads to a short doctor appointment, a quick MRI, and a sad diagnosis; you have ovarian cancer. It's 2007 and the MRI allowed your doctor to catch your terminal illness at a very early stage. One month later and you have lost your ovaries, but the tumors are gone too and since the cancer was contained, there is no need for chemotherapy at this time. You will go back to your doctor on a regular basis to have your body re-scanned for additional tumor growth, but since they caught it so early, your prognosis is looking good.

If this scenario had happened 100 years ago, your fate would've taken a very different path. The ovarian cancer symptoms might have hidden until the tumor growth was in a later stage and no treatment or cures were available. There was no way to scan the inside of someone's body without opening it up first, and symptoms such as bloat or minor pains in menopausal women were quickly brushed aside. In fact, other women in your family might've passed away from such an illness and you had no way of knowing that you were susceptible to such a thing due to its trail in your family's genetics.

It is brutally frightening to imagine how the human race ever survived in the past without the medical imaging supplies available to hospitals today. Updates in medical imaging have had a huge effect on many aspects of modern healthcare and the general economy. The following is a list of some definite benefits that patients, doctors, and the healthcare industry as a whole have felt with the newest medical imaging advances:

* Quicker decisions can be made when a doctor can be sure exactly what is going on inside their patient's body and can pinpoint the exact location of medical problem.

* Treatment can be administered sooner when the doctors can make a faster and more qualified decision about the necessary treatment type and dosage.

* Shorter hospital stays are the result of the faster decisions and more specialized treatment plans.

* Critical illnesses can be detected when they are still curable. Most types of cancers and stomach issues can be identified early.

* CT scans and MRI scans are both highly cost-effective for the hospital, the patient, and the health insurance company. Everyone wins.

* It is less invasive, leading to comfortable care and better outcomes due to avoiding major surgeries like open heart or open brain surgery.

* Targeted radiation protects surrounding healthy tissue from enduring the radiation that only the tumor needs.

* There is a high economic value to the patient, the hospital, and the health insurance companies with an overall higher life expectancy due to early detection and minimally invasive surgeries with short recoveries.

* Medical imaging data is available nationwide, stored in databases for any doctor who needs to see it in order to properly treat their patient.

It is easy to see that medical imaging has changed the dynamic of the medical field entirely since its' creation. There isn't much that goes on inside of a human being that a machine cannot detect or photograph, and the easier this information is obtained, the quicker medical treatment processes of the future will become. The advances that we will see in the near future will likely have to do more with targeted and non-invasive treatments, but these advances will only procure as a result of the newest medical imaging technology.