I thought radiologists need to know what to look for in order to diagnose something? Do they brute force every potential condition in the body that can be detected with an MRI?
Exactly, because an MRI is not a simple "shows problems" machine. It provides a very simplified model of certain aspects of the state of the body. We very often can't know if parts of that state are a health problem or not.
To my knowledge, studies have not shown any benefits of regular full body MRI's. You might find a problem, or you might find a non-problem and in the process of fixing it (aka operation / medication) you create a problem. Those two effects seem to balance out each other on average.
> I thought radiologists need to know what to look for in order to diagnose something? Do they brute force every potential condition in the body that can be detected with an MRI?
No, when they read a scan, they're supposed to read everything visible for every problem. Think of it this way: if you break your leg and they take an MRI, do you want the radiologist to miss a tumor because he was focused on the break?
About how many "parameters" do they evaluate roughly for a full body scan? And is one typically qualified to evaluate across the entire body or do they specialize in different areas of the body?
I don't know, but I've heard from doctors (many times, sometimes quite forcefully) that it's a radiologist's job to call out all abnormalities on the full image they get, and the reasoning makes sense.
I suppose a full body MRI would be very expensive and take a lot of time to read.
