Feb 20 2025 : MRI and LINAC

I've been thinking in what field I want to eventually specialize into. Electrical Engineering is pretty broad discipline. In simple terms, theres really small stuff like making little chips, that green thing that you see in computers. To the big transmission lines and grid, moving energy to power the world. It's hard to make a decision on where I want to focus, or where to even start, but I try my best to talk to professionals and seek out opportunities to learn about Electrical engineering. Today I serendipitously got an opportunity to get a tour of the Cross Cancer Institute. The whole premise was how to kill a tumour, the first step in getting rid of a tumor is being able to identify the tumour. That's where the MRI comes in, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, so basically they use a very strong magnet to align the water molecules in your body. By manipulating the magnet they can see how different water molecules interact with the magnet, using that we can figure if its a tumour or not. We saw the first MRI machine in North America there, which is still in use and we had to make sure we didn't have any metal or else it would fly straight at the magnet.

Now getting rid of the tumor, this calls for the LINAC, Linear particle accelerator. You take small particles and you shoot at the tumor, the tricky part about shooting at the tumor is that you can hit healthy cells around the tumour. Now this turns into an optimization problem of how many different directions you can take, that don't cut through healthy tissue. The LINAC we saw, had a precision of .5mm, and had 360 degree rotation around the point. There's even better technology now that's called a heavy ion beam, which only activates after a certain point, so instead of using a knife that cuts through the whole thing, it's like a little bomb that goes through everything and hits the tumor.

They made the first MRI + LINAC machine in the WORLD, so they could see the tumor, and kill it at the same time, a big drawback to having only the LINAC was that it usually had an imaging method that was inferior to the MRI ( I forgot the name). The reason it was so tricky is because MRI uses magnets, and linac uses an electron beam which induces a magnetic field which disturbs the magnet of the MRI.

This was only open to Engineering Physics students and Physics students, but we got in through a friend of a friend. The whole idea was to make this field known to physicists, because you need to be really good at physics to do these things. If you mess up an MRI or a LINAC, just these machines alone, cost millions of dollars, also you could accidentally kill someone. It's hard since it's a very essential field, but they can't take any guy of the street, since it's so important. In order to be medical physicist, you need a PhD in Medical imaging, specifically Medical Imaging, and then you need 2 years of residency at a hospital after that you have to write an exam from an international board, after you can be a medical physicist. The people showing us these instruments were all Medical Physicists and they all seemed like wonderful people, their work matters to the world, and it seems like a very good profession to go into. Although our guide was biased he said it's a great career and you can get paid, plus a guarantee of a job.

Not sure if this is for me, I really like talking to people, and I'm not sure if I can talk to alot of people in this role.

Day was pretty good, I wish I studied a little bit more. Some of this info presented might be wrong, I'm going straight off memory.