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:Sometimes I wonder...

[Explodicle]

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.

I know! What is WITH people always demanding lower prices AND better products/services? Pick ONE, folks!

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.

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

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.

Sorry it's no real MRI

[DrYak]

Problem is : it's not a real MRI. A portative MRI would be a REAL public danger because it has to generate ultra-strong magnetic fields to function properly.

This is just a bunch of lasers shining light through their target.
It only works on newborns' head because :
- Their skull is thin on most places and even un-fused in some places : light can easily go in.
- Their head is small so that the laser travels a short path and isn't absorbed that much and therefor still caries useful information when going out.

It's unusable for knees because they're to big and the bone is WAY to thick (one of the thickest. Remember : it has to support your body's weight).

I save premature babies and you should too...

[Fjornir]

...if you collect six of them you can turn them in for a free taco!

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 :)

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.

Re:Early adopters

[HermanAB]

Depends... Catholics believe life begins at conception. Protestants believe life begins at birth. Jews believe life begins when the children leave home and the dog dies.

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.