Our Credentials and Imaging Standards

A whole-body MRI is only as useful as the people and the standards behind it. This page explains who oversees your scan at MRI Wellness, who interprets the images, and the technical choices we make in the imaging itself.

Medical leadership

MRI Wellness is led by Edward M. Tavel, Jr., M.D., who has practiced medicine for more than thirty years. He earned his undergraduate degree from Davidson College and his medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina, then completed residency training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was selected as Chief Resident in his final year. He is board certified in Anesthesiology and in Pain Management, and has held multiple leadership roles across South Carolina medicine, including service on a hospital Medical Executive Committee and as managing partner of the state’s largest privately held anesthesiology group.

Dr. Tavel directs the clinic and its standards. He is not the physician who reads your images. That distinction matters, and the next section explains why.

View Dr. Tavel’s full curriculum vitae

Who interprets your images

Every study performed at MRI Wellness is interpreted by board-certified radiologists. Radiology is its own specialty with its own residency and board certification, and reading whole-body MRI well depends on that specific training. Your report comes from a physician trained to produce it.

MRI physics and quality control

Image quality is a physics problem before it is a medical one. A scanner that is out of calibration produces images that look convincing and are not. Our quality-control program is built with Moriel NesAiver, Ph.D., a medical physicist who has spent three decades working exclusively on MRI.

Most medical physicists split their attention across every imaging modality in a hospital. Dr. NesAiver does not. That focus is the reason we can speak specifically about how our scanner performs rather than generally about how MRI works.

Why we image at 1.5 Tesla

Higher field strength is often marketed as straightforwardly better. For whole-body screening it is not that simple. A 3.0T magnet produces more signal, but it also produces more susceptibility artifact and more distortion at tissue boundaries, particularly through the abdomen and near the lungs and bowel, which is precisely where a screening study needs to be reliable. Imaging at 1.5T gives more uniform image quality across a long field of view. It is a deliberate choice for this application rather than a compromise.

What we do not use

Our screening protocol uses no ionizing radiation and no gadolinium contrast. There is no cumulative radiation dose to weigh against the benefit of screening, and no contrast agent to clear. Much of the diagnostic value comes instead from diffusion-weighted imaging, which distinguishes tissue by how water moves within it and does not require an injected agent.

For patients traveling to Charleston

We are a single clinic in North Charleston, South Carolina. Patients do travel to us, and we are glad to help plan a visit, but we would rather be straightforward than persuasive: for most people the sensible reason to choose a screening provider is the standard of the imaging and the people reading it, not the distance involved. If you are weighing a longer trip, we are happy to talk it through honestly first.

MRI Wellness provides elective screening imaging. Screening is not a substitute for care from your primary physician, and no imaging test detects every condition.