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

MRI helped save my twins

[core]

I'm a dad of twin girls born very prematurely and with an extreme low weight (2 pounds each, basically). They stayed one month in ICU with dedicated monitoring 24/7. Today they're 18 months old, completely healthy with no sequels of their prematurity, partly because they had all the equipment at the ICU (MRI notably); if they moved the girls to a conventional facility they would have been in great danger. Needless to say I'm eternally grateful to medical advancements and the medical personnel that provides the care; I live in a country where we pay taxes through the nose, but I don't mind paying taxes for that purpose :)

Best regards,
Emmanuel

So what to you want, kill all diseased people ?

[DrYak]

Whish slashdot had a "-5, Eugenics flamebait troll" mod.
So what's your big plan, dude ? Killing every one who has a disease ? And what's your definition of disease ?
Let's kill all premmies ! And then proceede to retards, overweighted, short sighted, non-sportive, ugly, ...
In the end maybe you'll be killing everyone who isn't tall, strong, blond and blue-eyed ?
Trying to impersonate evolution and play Mother Nature ? Other people have tried that before too. Didn't work as they wished.

And how do you know that you aren't killing something useful ?
You may see sickle cells anemia disease, but maybe evolution saw it as a way to poison malaria ?
You may see more premmies, but maybe evolution will end up with a way to avoid pregnancy complications (hypertension, diabetes, ...) ?

Technology to help diseased survive may be costly, but by letting the scientific do reasearch and developpement on them, science will come with even cheaper and cheaper solutions.
Maybe some people though the same things, years ago, when penicillin was discovered : "Should we really be saving sick children and elderly who catch infections that easily ? Should we stop before 90% percent of the population has recieved such a 'easy-infection' gene ?"
But look today : anti-bacterial treatment are so cheap and easy to buy that we start to have problems with people USING it too much.
Same goes for vaccination : Once was something new, now is cheap and available very widely and has already managed to completly extinguish a few infectious diseases (and a few more other could be with enough efforts. And the rest could be better controlled).

To make an exageration, your question sound a little bit like : "Why do have a society ? economics ? Everyone on it's own. Survival of the fitest and strongest, otherway we handsome and strong barbarians will be invaded tomorrow by a huge amount of clumsy, glass-wearing, un-athletic, intellectual nerds that could otherwise be able to hit a mamoth point-blank and couldn't eat if we weren't around to feed them."
Now look what the nerds have developped today : Computers. The Internet. The exact things you're using right now to write about your eugenic garbage.

If you consider only genes maybe this can seem weird : we may look counter-productive in terms of evolution. But don't forget we evolve as a whole. As a civilisation, what we may apparently loose in terms of genes, we may compensate by developping more advanced technology that is ALSO passed along to futur generations. (Dawkin's memes)

And about a "premmies"-gene dominating the population : very unlikely. A new caracteristic will spread that fast, in competition with the general population, only if it has a lot of beneficial advantages, and the only small disadvantage was very easily removed by a new easy and cheap treatment. Which isn't the case yet : It is only a small step toward better help for babies. It's not likely to make a fast boom and propagate through general population at mad speeds, it needs positive selection (being a good advantage) for that to happen. Otherwise it'll take thousands of years to spread and by them, humanity will either have disapeared. Or will have discovered much more advanced forms of technology.

And for the last time : Please stop talking about killing what you consider inferior. Let evolution sort it in the long term.

Functional imaging is different

[macduck]

Interesting article. What's special about this is that it represents functional, not anatomic, imaging of the brain. Bedside neonatal head imaging is currently dominated by ultrasound, useful in identifying areas of hemorrhage most common in preemies. MRI is also useful in neonates, but again usually looking for hemorrhage or abnormalities of brain morphology.

This technique uses light attenuation to measure oxygen consumption in the brain. Hemoglobin (Hb) is the oxygen-carrying molecule in blood. It can bind up to 4 oxygen molecules, and in this configuration is called oxyhemoglobin. When unbound, it's called deoxyhemoglobin. The technique they've developed can measure relative concentrations of the two forms of Hb allowing the computation of areas of increased metabolic activity or brain activity. The article boils down to being able to show increased activity in the upper extremity motor cortex when the researchers moved the kids' arms.

In this sense, the technique is more like PET or functional MRI (fMRI) imaging, and appears to be a visual analog to EEG, or electroencephalography, commonly used by neurologists to identify seizure foci. Instead of a series of squiggly lines (think polygraph test), this actually gives you a series of slices of the brain with color demonstrating the area of activity.

Clinically, this won't replace ultrasound or MRI, but it will provide more information about brain function. This may help determine an infant's prognosis after the ultrasound has already demonstrated a hemorrhage, or assist a neurosurgeon trying to eliminate a seizure focus.