Radiology Trivia
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This radiology trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and covers the history and science of medical imaging: Röntgen's discovery on 8 November 1895 and his wife's skeletal hand, Edison's fluoroscope and the assistant it killed, Marie Curie's petites Curies, the EMI scanner and the first CT patient in Wimbledon, the Hounsfield scale, the MRI Nobel that left out Damadian, Ian Donald's obstetric ultrasound, Doppler, PET and FDG, the moly cow, contrast agents, grays and sieverts, ALARA and the lead apron. Easy questions ask who discovered X-rays and which scan uses no ionising radiation; harder ones want the half-life of technetium-99m, the founder of mammography and the anatomist whose hand Röntgen X-rayed in public. It works for Rad Tech Week and World Radiography Day, radiography students, imaging departments and pub quiz teams with a doctor on board. Every answer has been checked against the encyclopaedia entry for each topic, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On a standard X-ray image, which of these appears black?
Air
Air. Dense bone and metal block most of the rays and show white, muscle and fat come out in shades of grey, and air-filled lungs let nearly everything through, so they look dark.
Q 02Röntgen named his discovery 'X-rays' because, in mathematics, x stands for what?
An unknown quantity
An unknown quantity. He meant the label as a stopgap while he worked out what the rays were, but it stuck in English; many other languages call them Röntgen rays instead.
Q 03Whose hand appears in Röntgen's famous first X-ray photograph of the human body, taken in 1895?
His wife's
His wife's. Anna Bertha Röntgen kept her hand still over a photographic plate, and the developed picture showed the shadows of its bones and of the ring she was wearing.
Q 04Röntgen won which award in 1901 for discovering X-rays?
The first Nobel Prize in Physics
The first Nobel Prize in Physics. He accepted the award but, shy of public speaking, declined to give the lecture that laureates are expected to deliver.
Q 05A DEXA scan uses low-dose X-rays to measure what?
Bone density
Bone density. Two X-ray beams of different energies pass through the bones, and the difference in how they are absorbed reveals thinning that an ordinary X-ray would miss.
Q 06Which two men shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the CT scanner?
Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack
Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack. They never worked together: Cormack published the mathematics in 1963 and 1964, and Hounsfield, unaware of it, engineered a scanner of his own.
Q 07The first CT scanner was built at which electronics company, better known for its record label?
EMI
EMI. Its engineers had worked on radar and built an early all-transistor computer before turning to medicine, and the first machines were sold as the EMI-Scanner.
Q 08In 1971 the first CT scan of a patient was carried out at Atkinson Morley Hospital in which city?
London
London. The scan picked out a cyst in the patient's brain; the experimental rig had been tested on bullocks' brains, which its inventor carried across the city on public transport.
Q 09On the scale that CT scanners use to grade how dense each tissue is, which substance is fixed at zero?
Water
Water. Everything else is scored against it, denser tissue above zero and lighter material below, so every shade of grey in a CT image is really a number.
Q 10The word tomography comes from Greek words meaning what?
Slice and write
Slice and write. The name fits a method that records the body one cross-section at a time, where an ordinary X-ray piles every layer into a single overlapping shadow.
Q 11Instead of X-rays, an MRI scanner builds its images using a powerful magnet and pulses of what?
Radio waves
Radio waves. Each pulse knocks nuclei in the body's tissues out of line with the magnetic field, and the scanner reads the faint signals they give off as they swing back.
Q 12Who shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning MRI?
Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield
Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield. Lauterbur showed that varying the magnetic field across a sample could turn its signals into a picture, and Mansfield made the method fast enough for hospitals.
Q 13Who performed the first full-body MRI scan of a human being, in 1977?
Q 21Which inventor built an early commercial fluoroscope, then gave up X-ray work after his assistant was fatally injured by radiation?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison. The assistant was a glassblower, Clarence Dally, who died in 1904 after losing a hand to radiation burns; Edison himself came close to losing his eyesight.
Q 22What is the most common radiographic examination in medicine?
The chest X-ray
The chest X-ray. It shows the heart, lungs and ribs in a single exposure, for a dose matching only days of the natural background radiation everyone receives.
Q 23Which two elements are the classic contrast agents swallowed or injected to show up on X-rays?
Iodine and barium
Raymond Damadian
Raymond Damadian. He named his hand-built machine Indomitable, and the first person it scanned was not Damadian himself but his graduate assistant, Larry Minkoff.
Q 14In what unit is the field strength of an MRI magnet measured?
Tesla
Tesla. The unit honours the inventor Nikola Tesla, and a hospital scanner's field is strong enough to fling a steel wheelchair across the room, which is why metal is kept out.
Q 15Which nuclei does conventional MRI image, because they are so abundant in the body's water and fat?
Hydrogen protons
Hydrogen protons. Each one behaves like a tiny magnet that lines up with the scanner's field, and with so much water in every tissue there are enough of them to give a clear signal.
Q 16Marie Curie's mobile X-ray units for First World War field hospitals were nicknamed what?
Little Curies
Little Curies, or petites Curies. Curie drove one of the vans herself and worked near the front with her teenage daughter Irène, using the X-rays to find metal splinters in wounded soldiers.
Q 17Marie Curie named which element, the first she discovered, after her native country?
Polonium
Polonium. She was born in Warsaw at a time when Poland had been carved up between its neighbours, and the name was a way of putting her country back on the map.
Q 18Which Glasgow professor pioneered obstetric ultrasound, with a landmark Lancet paper in 1958?
Ian Donald
Ian Donald. He borrowed an industrial technology built to find flaws in metal welds and pressure vessels, and worked with an engineer to turn it into a scanner for unborn babies.
Q 19The ultrasound technique for measuring blood flow is named after which 19th-century physicist?
Christian Doppler
Christian Doppler. He was really writing about starlight, arguing that a moving star's colour should shift just as a moving sound's pitch does; the sound version was confirmed three years later.
Q 20Why is sharper, higher-frequency ultrasound reserved for structures close to the skin?
It cannot penetrate deep tissue
It cannot penetrate deep tissue. The body absorbs high-pitched sound more quickly, so scans trade detail for depth: high frequencies for tendons, lower ones for the liver or kidneys.
Iodine and barium. Both are heavy elements that block X-rays, so a barium drink outlines the stomach and gut on the image, while iodine compounds are the ones given by injection.
Q 24Which Portuguese neurologist developed cerebral angiography in 1927?
Egas Moniz
Egas Moniz. He went on to share the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine, not for this work but for devising the brain operation known as lobotomy.
Q 25Who invented angioplasty and the catheter-delivered stent, the 'father of interventional radiology'?
Charles Dotter
Charles Dotter. In 1964 he slid a catheter through a blocked leg artery in a woman who had refused amputation, opening it without surgery; the method has since saved thousands of limbs.
Q 26What is the most commonly used medical radioisotope in the world?
Technetium-99m
Technetium-99m. Its gamma rays are easy for a camera outside the body to detect, and with a half-life of six hours nearly all of it has decayed within a day, keeping the dose low.
Q 27Radioactive iodine is used to scan and treat which gland, which naturally soaks up the element from the blood?
Thyroid
Thyroid. Because the gland collects iodine to make its hormones and no other organ absorbs much, a dose of radioactive iodine homes in on thyroid cells and destroys them from within.
Q 28The most common tracer in PET cancer scans is a radioactive look-alike of which nutrient?
Glucose
Glucose. Cancer cells are more metabolically active and take up sugar faster than their neighbours, so they hoard the tracer and show up as bright spots on the scan.
Q 29What does the 'P' in PET scan stand for?
Positron
Positron. The tracer gives off these antimatter twins of the electron; each soon meets an electron and the pair vanish in a flash of gamma rays that the scanner's ring of detectors picks up.
Q 30The SI unit of absorbed radiation dose, one joule per kilogram, is named after which physicist?
Louis Harold Gray
Louis Harold Gray. A hospital physicist by trade, he pioneered ways of measuring how much energy X-rays and radium deposit in living tissue, which is exactly what his unit counts.