Medical Imaging

Medical imaging is the discipline of constructing visual representations of the interior of the body for clinical diagnosis and intervention. The field encompasses a spectrum of physical principles — ionizing radiation in CT and X-ray, acoustic waves in ultrasound, magnetic fields in MRI, and radioactive tracers in PET — each of which poses a distinct inverse problem: recovering spatial structure from signals that have passed through, been emitted by, or resonated with tissue. What unifies these disparate modalities is not their physics but their information structure: every medical imager is a sampling system that trades resolution, contrast, dose, and acquisition time under constraints set by radiation dose limits, patient motion, and the fundamental noise floor of the detector.