Portable Brain Scanner to Save Premature Babies

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at UCL (University College London) are developing a portable brain scanner which could help save the lives of premature and newborn babies in intensive care by avoiding to move them to conventional scanning facilities. A current prototype combines the advantages of both magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. It uses optical tomography to generate images showing how the brain is working and a new generation should be ready by 2008 and such scanners should be commercially available shortly after."

Comments

Not just babies

[brohan]

Small portable MRI's could not be used only for babies.

I've got a problem with my knee, which was diagnosed without actually *seeing* it through an x-ray machine. With the resolution of an MRI it would likley be visible. Assuming my knee is as big as a babies head, this could be used in orthapedic applications as well.

From the pictures in the article, I figure its big enough to fit most limbs in it.

Sometimes I wonder...

[the_humeister]

Being in the medical field, I can't help but wonder about the discrepancy between people wanting lower health care costs and their expectations for modern health care to perform miracles. They seem to me to be mutually exclusive. While innovative technologies such as the one described in the article are fascinating, it will surely drive up NICU costs even more if it is adopted. Of course ICUs in general are money sinks anyway.

Re:According to the pro-abortion left,

[Kickboy12]

Either way, they are just a clump of cells. AND SO ARE YOU

Basic Biology. Learned that in 8th grade, dude.

MRI's

[TheUncleD]

For babies it would provide an excellent advantage to predicting the right treatments early on in development. It's too bad that brain damage cannot be forseen early on in pregnancy and averted through re-correction of certain DNA modifications. That's sci-fi though for you. MRIS fall under the radiology/xray world. They are actually fairly new in terms of technology and now can provide fairly accurate brain scans although a lot remains to be understood about the data they feed back. MRI's were first discovered to work in 1977 and they took about 5 hours to produce a single image. Smithsonian institute actually has the first MRI machine which looks more futuristic in its design then a lot of the new ones do.

MRI scanners vary in size and shape, and newer models have some degree of openness around the sides, but the basic design is the same. Once the body part to be scanned is in the exact center or isocenter of the magnetic field, the scan can begin.

As of todays technology, the MRI provides the greatest view inside the human body that technology can afford without doing actual surgery. It is largely done through discernment using that contrast injection technology, where injecting certain colored dies into the blood stream lets them see the seperation of parts. Its a very cool technology, all made possible through magnetism.

How about this...

[Stan Vassilev]

We're all talking about NATURAL selection these days, (vs ID). Well guess what we're doing with the miracles of modern medicine?

Breaking the natural selection. All kinds of diseases have gone up and we all attribute this to the worse conditions we live in. Noone seems to notice that due to modern medicine, more sick people survive, have children and contribute to the problem.

Now of course it's a huge moral dilemma. If something happens with a human I care about, would I let him/her go if it helps some abstract concept of natural selection? Nope.

But the mass effect anyway, is that it's a vicious cycle: the more the medicine gets better, the more we'll need it to survive.

Either this, or expect some GATAKA-like distopia in the short to medium term future :)

Re:MRI helped save my twins

[MadAhab]

I'm a dad of triplet girls born at 24 weeks. All together they weighed less than 3 1/2 lbs. The smallest one did not survive, but the other two did, and they're doing great at nearly 2 years (20 mo adjusted), though they spent 4 months and 8 months in the NICU.

More accurate scanning without having to leave the NICU means that parents can have more information about their children when making life or death decisions. Parents do need advice from doctors, and there is such a thing as care that is decidedly "futile", to use a term of art. But better information permits doctors and parents to make better decisions about whether there is a life to save (ultimately parents have to make the decision about whether a life is "worth saving", and if you aren't that parent, you simply don't know).

Better information means untold dollars saved, untold anguish to the parents spared, and precious lives saved that might otherwise be seen as hopeless cases. When it comes to the ethics and morality of end-of-life decisions, it's clear that only the uninvolved and the completely insane can hold absolutist positions (witness Terry Schiavo); the rest of us realize that some relative certainty, clouded by difficult decisions and incomplete knowledge, with lots of forgiveness and sympathy, is often the best that we can achieve. Only the radically evil can insist that more information is anything but an outright blessing.