Although you can see different types of medical equipments on television and when you enter a hospital, there may be very few who are aware that each one belongs to a category. In fact, most of the people don’t realize that some of the branches of medicine like geriatrics, community medicine, etc don’t need special medical equipments for treating their patients.

Although it is easy to classify the medical equipments as the scanners, sensors and similar such names, they do have scientific category names assigned to them. In medicine they are categorized based on their purpose and how they serve people. Of course, when more importance is given to the technical side, these machines would have entirely different classification, like based on the way of working.

You may have seen the imaging machines, like the MRI scanners, CT scanners and many others. These are called the diagnostic equipments as they help to diagnose the problem with the patient. These equipments may also be used at home for various purposes like for controlling diabetes mellitus. The medical monitors are used to track down a patient’s vital conditions, like the ECG, EEG, etc.

Another group of major equipments are the life support equipments. These are, as the name suggests used to support the life of a patient who is too weak to do it themselves, like breathing which can be aided by the ventilator, to he dialysis unit which helps to eliminate wastes in the body. The therapeutic equipments like medical lasers, infusion pumps and similar ones are used for therapeutic purposes.

Lastly, you may classify the equipments used in the laboratories for various testing and analysis as the medical laboratory equipments. So you can see that all the medical equipments belongs to a class of its own, sometimes based on the purpose or function, and at other times based on their working.