Video Transcript

Host:
Question: Quickly you mentioned a couple of the other careers that you could take under the umbrella of the radiologist. Are there others that would be super closely related to an X-ray tech that either may or may not be like transferable skills or transferable education of some of the ones you’ve mentioned?

Jennifer:
Answer: So to move into Cat scan, MRI, mammography, NUC Med and radiation therapy, you are actually required to have your registry like your certification already an X-ray before you could even move into that. The umbrella under radiology that doesn’t require your certification in X-ray already is ultrasound. The imaging types of ultrasound scenography is different. They use soundwaves for that image for us for X-ray and CAT scan NUC Med it’s ionizing radiation. MRI uses magnetic waves to produce. The image is kind of like you already have to know the anatomy. Ct and MRI is cross-sectional anatomy, whereas X-ray is like a flat image, I guess technically like 2d, I guess you call it. But basically, you have to have your basis in X-ray before you can move into those because you have to understand the how is this image produced? You know, what is the anatomy of this going into this? Well, as far as mammography goes, there’s also radiation therapy, cancer treatments.

Farrel:
Answer: You can be a radiation therapist and that requires radiologic technologist degree. Before you do that, that’s a specialty. I also thought about ultrasound as well, but in some places you don’t have to do X-ray first. You can just go straight to an ultrasound. And I liked that. But mammography fit better into my life because I’m a single mom and in order to pay my bills, I have to work in the clinical time for ultrasound or radiation. Therapy was like 40 hours a week of clinicals and I couldn’t figure out how to work and pay my mortgage. So this was training on the job and then studying for weeks and then taking a certification exam. So it worked better.

Jenna:
Answer: Actually from an education standpoint, a lot of bachelor’s and higher education programs, they start with x-ray, right? Because that is really going to give you the anatomy of the body. And with x ray, you can kind of branch off into mammography, which uses the same type of ionizing radiation to produce the images of the breast computed tomography, which also uses the ionizing radiation. So that patient is placed on a table that kind of goes in the Gantry, which is the opening for the CT machine. And it’s just an X-ray unit that is kind of circular going around that patient’s body. And so they all use ionizing radiation, which is why X-ray is usually the starting point. So another modality is we have nuclear medicine, ultrasound, MRI. Those are going to use different technology. So nuclear medicine also uses radiation that it’s actually administered to the patient’s body. So they become a source of radiation rather than it coming from a tube ultrasound that uses acoustic energy, which is sound energy to produce images and then magnetic resonance imaging or MRI scan to use a magnet. So that changes the way that our water molecules in the body are aligned. And that means like radio field to produce those magnetic images.