Gambia Women U17 set to undergo MRI tests

The Gambia Women Under 17 team that qualified to the FIFA Women U17 World Cup that is set to take place in Azerbaijan will undergo MRI test before the tournament starts, Gambia Sports Online can reveal.

Age-based competitions usually evoke questions of eligibility and cheating – are players always within the age limit or over? It could be recalled that The Gambia had an unhappy experience in 2009 when after winning the African title and qualifying for the FIFA finals more than half the team were deemed overage and therefore ineligible for the FIFA finals after MRI tests conducted on the players in Senegal.

It could be recalled that the foundation stone for The Gambia’s first ever Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Department was laid on 2nd June 2011 at the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital (RVTH) grounds in Banjul by the Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Fatim Badjie.

In an interview, it was put to the chairman of the football normalization committee Alhaji OB Conateh that there was a likelihood not all the girls would make it to Azerbaijan if subjected to similar tests ahead of the World Cup final but he revealed that the test will be carried out in the country and that he is hopeful that 95% of the girls will make it to the finals.

Alhaji OB said, “We’re going to test them here [Gambia], now in Gambia, we have the MRI machines and we are going to test all of them and those who fall under the age bracket will go but 95% of them will pass the MRI test.”

What is MRI?

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI), or Magnetic Resonance Tomography (MRT) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology [a medical specialty that employs the use of imaging to both diagnose and treat disease visualised within the human body] to visualize detailed internal structures.

MRI makes use of the property of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to image nuclei of atoms inside the body. An MRI machine uses a powerful magnetic field to align the magnetization of some atomic nuclei in the body, and radio frequency fields to systematically alter the alignment of this magnetization.

This causes the nuclei to produce a rotating magnetic field detectable by the scanner — and this information is recorded to construct an image of the scanned area of the body. Magnetic field gradients cause nuclei at different locations to rotate at different speeds.

By using gradients in different directions 2D images or 3D volumes can be obtained in any arbitrary orientation. MRI provides good contrast between the different soft tissues of the body, which makes it especially useful in imaging the brain, muscles, the heart, and cancers compared with other medical imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) or X-rays. Unlike CT scans or traditional X-rays, MRI does not use ionizing radiation.