Where MRI earns its place
- Brain and spinal cord, including discs and nerve compression.
- Knees, shoulders, hips and other joints, when cartilage, ligaments or tendons are the question.
- Liver, prostate, uterus and other organs, often after ultrasound has already been done.
- Heart muscle, in selected cardiology questions.
Where it is not the first test
A broken bone, a chest infection and many emergency questions are faster with X-ray or CT. Breast screening still starts with mammography. Bowel cancer screening is not an MRI. A preventive whole-body scan is a choice, not a replacement for those programmes.
The useful question is not “is MRI better?”. It is “better for this question?”. Your referrer, or the radiologist at a private clinic, should be able to say why MRI was chosen over ultrasound or CT.