Radiographer
Radiographers are healthcare professionals who perform medical imaging and radiation therapy. Medical imaging is used for the diagnosis of pathology, while radiation therapy is used for treatment.
The duties and responsibilities of a radiographer include performing radiographic examinations, arranging radiographic examination projections with precision, carrying out radiotherapy procedures for disease treatment, being responsible for the radiation dose delivered to patients, conducting nuclear medicine examinations, managing and utilising radioactive substances including radiopharmaceuticals, implementing radiation protection measures to ensure the safety of patients and healthcare workers, as well as educating and explaining to patients about the procedures to be performed.
Work environment
Radiographers are allied health professionals who work in both public healthcare and private healthcare, and can be physically located in a range of clinical settings that provide diagnostic imaging or radiation therapy services — most frequently in dedicated diagnostic imaging departments or radiation therapy departments within hospitals. The practice varies from country to country and can even vary between hospitals in the same country.Professional organizations
Radiographers are represented by a variety of organizations worldwide, including the International Society of Radiographers and Radiological Technologists which aim to give direction to the profession as a whole through collaboration with national representative bodies.History
For the first three decades of medical imaging's existence, there was no standardized differentiation between the roles that we now differentiate as radiologic technologist versus radiologist. By the 1930s and 1940s, as it became increasingly apparent that proper interpretation of the images required not only a physician but also one who was specifically trained and experienced in doing so, the differentiation between the roles was formalized. Simultaneously, it also became increasingly true that just as a radiologic technologist cannot do the radiologist's job, the radiologist also cannot do the radiologic technologist's job, as it requires knowledge, skills, experience, and certifications that are specific to it.Radiography's origins and fluoroscopy's origins can both be traced to 8 November 1895, when German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the X-ray and noted that, while it could pass through human tissue, it could not pass through bone or metal. Röntgen referred to the radiation as "X", to indicate that it was an unknown type of radiation. He received the first Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery.
There are conflicting accounts of his discovery because Röntgen had his lab notes burned after his death, but this is a likely reconstruction by his biographers: Röntgen was investigating cathode rays using a fluorescent screen painted with barium platinocyanide and a Crookes tube which he had wrapped in black cardboard to shield its fluorescent glow. He noticed a faint green glow from the screen, about 1 metre away. Röntgen realized some invisible rays coming from the tube were passing through the cardboard to make the screen glow: they were passing through an opaque object to affect the film behind it.
Röntgen discovered X-rays' medical use when he made a picture of his wife's hand on a photographic plate formed due to X-rays. The photograph of his wife's hand was the first ever photograph of a human body part using X-rays. When she saw the picture, she said, "I have seen my death."
The first use of X-rays under clinical conditions was by John Hall-Edwards in Birmingham, England on 11 January 1896, when he radiographed a needle stuck in the hand of an associate. On 14 February 1896, Hall-Edwards also became the first to use X-rays in a surgical operation.
The United States saw its first medical X-ray obtained using a discharge tube of Ivan Pulyui's design. In January 1896, on reading of Röntgen's discovery, Frank Austin of Dartmouth College tested all of the discharge tubes in the physics laboratory and found that only the Pulyui tube produced X-rays. This was a result of Pulyui's inclusion of an oblique "target" of mica, used for holding samples of fluorescent material, within the tube. On 3 February 1896 Gilman Frost, professor of medicine at the college, and his brother Edwin Frost, professor of physics, exposed the wrist of Eddie McCarthy, whom Gilman had treated some weeks earlier for a fracture, to the X-rays and collected the resulting image of the broken bone on gelatin photographic plates obtained from Howard Langill, a local photographer also interested in Röntgen's work.
X-rays were put to diagnostic use very early; for example, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton opened a radiographic laboratory in the United Kingdom in 1896, before the dangers of ionizing radiation were discovered. Indeed, Marie Curie pushed for radiography to be used to treat wounded soldiers in World War I. Initially, many kinds of staff conducted radiography in hospitals, including physicists, photographers, physicians, nurses, and engineers. The medical speciality of radiology grew up over many years around the new technology. When new diagnostic tests were developed, it was natural for the radiographers to be trained in and to adopt this new technology. Radiographers now perform fluoroscopy, computed tomography, mammography, ultrasound, nuclear medicine and magnetic resonance imaging as well. Although a nonspecialist dictionary might define radiography quite narrowly as "taking X-ray images", this has long been only part of the work of "X-ray Departments", Radiographers, and Radiologists. Initially, radiographs were known as roentgenograms, while Skiagrapher was used until about 1918 to mean Radiographer.
The history of magnetic resonance imaging includes many researchers who have discovered NMR and described its underlying physics, but it is regarded to be invented by Paul C. Lauterbur in September 1971; he published the theory behind it in March 1973. The factors leading to image contrast had been described nearly 20 years earlier by Erik Odeblad and Gunnar Lindström.
In 1950, spin echoes and free induction decay were first detected by Erwin Hahn and in 1952, Herman Carr produced a one-dimensional NMR spectrum as reported in his Harvard PhD thesis. In the Soviet Union, Vladislav Ivanov filed a document with the USSR State Committee for Inventions and Discovery at Leningrad for a Magnetic Resonance Imaging device, although this was not approved until the 1970s.
By 1959, Jay Singer had studied blood flow by NMR relaxation time measurements of blood in living humans. Such measurements were not introduced into common medical practice until the mid-1980s, although a patent for a whole-body NMR machine to measure blood flow in the human body was already filed by Alexander Ganssen in early 1967.
In the 1960s and 1970s the results of a very large amount of work on relaxation, diffusion, and chemical exchange of water in cells and tissues of various types appeared in the scientific literature. In 1967, Ligon reported the measurement of NMR relaxation of water in the arms of living human subjects. In 1968, Jackson and Langham published the first NMR signals from a living animal.
Role in healthcare
A radiographer uses their expertise and knowledge of patient care, physics, human anatomy, physiology, pathology and radiology to assess patients, develop optimum radiological techniques and evaluate the resulting radiographic media.This branch of healthcare is extremely varied, especially between different countries, and as a result radiographers in one country often have a completely different role to that of radiographers in another. However, the base responsibilities of the radiographer are summarised below:
- Autonomy as a professional
- Accountability as a professional
- Contribute to and participate in continuing professional development
- Enforcement of radiation protection
- Justification of radiographic examinations
- Patient care
- Production of diagnostic media
- Safe, efficient and correct use of diagnostic equipment
- Supervise students and assistants
Contrary to what could be inferred, radiographers conduct and contribute to investigations which are not necessarily radiological in nature, e.g. sonography and magnetic resonance imaging.
Radiographers often have opportunities to enter military service due to their role in healthcare. As with most other occupations in the medical field many radiographers have rotating shifts that include night duties.