When healthy adults get a full-body MRI scan, those flagged with higher ONCO-RADS scores (4 or 5) are much more likely to actually have cancer—about 4 in 10 for score 4 and 3 in 4 for score 5.

When doctors scan healthy people’s whole bodies with MRI, they find cancer in about 1 out of every 80 people—but almost a quarter of those with suspicious findings never get follow-up tests, so we might be missing even more cancers than we think.

If you're an adult with no symptoms, being older, having high blood pressure, carrying hepatitis B, or having had surgery before might mean your full-body MRI shows more suspicious findings that could need further checking.

Using a full-body MRI scan on people who feel fine might help doctors find hidden cancers or other serious health problems early, especially when they use special rules to decide what needs follow-up.

Using a full-body MRI scan to check for hidden health problems has been linked to finding cancers and other serious conditions in real patients, and doctors use special scoring systems to decide who needs more tests.

To make sure different hospitals and researchers can compare MRI scans properly, they all need to use the same checklist—like ONCO-RADS—so their data matches up and can be combined for bigger studies.