Medical imaging

Medical imaging is a broad term that encompasses a variety of techniques or processes to create visual representations of the body for diagnosis, treatment, and management of diseases. Traditionally medical imaging has been associated with radiology where images are used to peer into the body and visualize internal structures not visible from the outside. Today, however, medical imaging includes a variety of other specialties where images are acquired in order to help clinicians better understand the characteristics and mechanisms underlying disease processes that cannot be acquired simply by viewing a patient, analyzing lab reports, or asking them about their symptoms. Thus, clinical specialties such as pathology, ophthalmology, and dermatology are increasingly using images in everyday practice. Telemedicine, or the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve a patient’s clinical health status, is a rapidly expanding tool in medicine that relies not only on still (or store-and-forward) images but uses real-time videoconferencing to connect patients and providers across distances.