A less invasive procedure known as a virtual colonscopy is done with a CT scan that passes x-rays through a patient's abdomen.
VOA: standard.2010.04.07
"You can have a patient from the hospital with abdominal pain as an example, and you can run him through every high-tech equipment, CT scan, MRIs -- it's unlimited, " Zelt said.
Miller of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland and her colleagues looked at 291 patients who were scheduled for an angiogram but also had a 64-slice CT scan.
The radiation exposure from a Mars journey is similar to getting a full-body CT scan every five or six days, said lead researcher Cary Zeitlin of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.