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This radiology trivia quiz has 50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who discovered X-rays in 1895?
Wilhelm Röntgen
He was experimenting with vacuum tubes at the University of Würzburg on the evening of 8 November 1895.
Q 02Why did Röntgen call his discovery 'X'-rays?
X was the mathematical sign for something unknown
He ate and slept in his lab for weeks investigating them; many languages still call them Röntgen rays.
Q 03Whose hand appears in the famous first X-ray radiograph, taken about six weeks after the discovery?
Röntgen's wife, Anna Bertha
On seeing her skeleton she is said to have exclaimed 'I have seen my death!'
Q 04Röntgen won which award in 1901 for discovering X-rays?
The first Nobel Prize in Physics
Like the Curies, he refused to patent his discovery so that everyone could benefit from it.
Q 05World Radiography Day is celebrated on which date?
8 November
It marks the anniversary of the 1895 discovery; the International Society of Radiographers has celebrated it since 2007.
Q 06Which two men shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing the CT scanner?
Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack
Cormack, a Tufts physicist, had never earned a doctorate in any scientific field.
Q 07At which company did Godfrey Hounsfield build the first CT scanner?
EMI
The first production machines were simply called EMI scanners.
Q 08Where and when was the first clinical CT scan performed on a patient?
Atkinson Morley Hospital, London, 1971
The patient had a cerebral cyst; Hounsfield had tested his prototype on a preserved brain, a butcher's cow brain and himself.
Q 09On the Hounsfield scale used in CT, what value is assigned to distilled water?
0 HU
Air is -1000; each unit is a 0.1 percent change in the attenuation of water.
Q 10The word tomography comes from Greek words meaning what?
Slice and write
Tome is slice, graphein is to write.
Q 11Which imaging method uses no ionising radiation at all, unlike CT and PET?
MRI
It relies on the magnetic spin of hydrogen protons responding to radio-frequency pulses inside a strong magnet.
Q 12Who shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning MRI?
Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield
Mansfield developed echo-planar imaging, the technique behind fast MRI.
Q 13Who performed the first full-body MRI scan of a human being, in 1977?
Raymond Damadian
He had proposed an MR body scanner in 1969 and was famously left out of the 2003 Nobel Prize.
Q 21Superficial structures like the thyroid are scanned at higher ultrasound frequencies. Roughly what range?
7 to 18 MHz
Deep organs such as the liver use lower frequencies, 1 to 6 MHz, trading resolution for penetration.
Q 22His assistant became one of the first radiation deaths. Which inventor built an early commercial fluoroscope?
Thomas Edison
Glassblower Clarence Dally lost his left hand and four fingers of his right before dying in 1904.
Q 23What is the most common radiographic examination in medicine?
The chest X-ray
It shows heart, lungs, airways and bones in a single exposure.
Q 14In what unit is the field strength of an MRI magnet measured?
Tesla
Most clinical systems run at 1.5 T; 3 T scanners give better soft-tissue images and research systems reach 7 T.
Q 15Which nuclei does conventional MRI image, because they are so abundant in the body's water and fat?
Hydrogen protons
Their nuclear spins resonate with the radio-frequency pulse and emit a signal as they relax.
Q 16Marie Curie's mobile X-ray units for First World War field hospitals were nicknamed what?
Petites Curies
She learned anatomy and car mechanics for the job and was helped by her 17-year-old daughter Irène.
Q 17What killed Marie Curie in 1934, likely a result of her radiation exposure?
Aplastic anaemia
She died at a sanatorium in the French Alps aged 66.
Q 18Which Glasgow professor pioneered obstetric ultrasound, with a landmark Lancet paper in June 1958?
Ian Donald
He worked with obstetrician John MacVicar and engineer Tom Brown of Kelvin & Hughes.
Q 19Who probably first imaged the human body with ultrasound, outlining the brain's ventricles in 1941?
Karl Theo Dussik
The Austrian neurologist worked with his physicist brother Friedrich.
Q 20The ultrasound technique for measuring blood flow is named after which 19th-century physicist?
Christian Doppler
He described the frequency shift of waves from a moving source in 1842.
Q 24Which two elements are the classic positive contrast agents in X-ray imaging?
Iodine and barium
Air and carbon dioxide are used as negative agents; gadolinium is the MRI contrast.
Q 25Which Portuguese neurologist developed cerebral angiography in 1927?
Egas Moniz
His colleague Reynaldo dos Santos performed the first aortogram in Lisbon two years later.
Q 26Who invented angioplasty and the catheter-delivered stent, the 'father of interventional radiology'?
Charles Dotter
He described angioplasty in 1964; it was first used for peripheral arterial disease.
Q 27What is the most commonly used medical radioisotope in the world?
Technetium-99m
Its six-hour half-life and 140 keV gamma rays make it ideal; it is 'milked' from molybdenum-99 generators.
Q 28What is the half-life of the metastable isotope used in most nuclear medicine scans?
About 6 hours
Roughly 94 percent of it decays within 24 hours, keeping patient dose low.
Q 29Which glucose analogue is the workhorse radiotracer of PET scanning in oncology?
FDG (fluorodeoxyglucose)
Cancer cells gobble up the sugar mimic, lighting up on the scan.
Q 30In PET, what happens when the emitted positron meets an electron?
They annihilate, releasing two gamma rays in opposite directions
Detectors on opposite sides of the ring catch the pair, which is how the scanner locates the source.