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British Scientists Develop Wearable MRI Scanner (wcax.com)
British scientists have invented a new type of brain scanner that patients can wear on their head allowing them to move while being tested. "Neuroscientists will be able to envisage a whole new world of experiments where we try to work out what a brain is doing but whilst a person is behaving naturally," said Matt Brookes, a physicist at the University of Nottinham. CBS reports: The device, which looks like a prop from a budget sci-fi movie or phantom of the opera, is in fact the latest thing in brain scanning. "I think in terms of mapping brain activity, brain function, this represents a step change," said Brookes. Because you can do this while wearing it -- play bat and ball, or even drink a cup of tea. It was at Nottingham University in the early 70s that the MRI was first developed. Now the wearable 'MEG' system has the potential to open a whole new field of brain scanning. The scanner records the magnetic field produced by brain activity and can show precisely where in the brain these movements are being controlled. The area of the brain shown in blue is where wrist and arm movements are controlled while playing bat and ball.
cool!
Is that like scanning circular circuits of neurons? And I mean big ass circuits.
How is that an indication of neural activity? Why is locality of activity in a brain more interesting than spread out activity?
This is not an MRI. This is something called MEG, and it just records magnetic field around brain. It has nothing to do with magnetic resonace.
An MRI is completely and totally unrelated to an MEG. They are related in the same way that washing machines and flagpoles are related.
This is a MEG scanner, not a MRI device. The system measures the magnetic field emitted by the brain (MEG), not nuclear resonance in brain tissue exposed to a magnetic field (MRI).
The technology may be neat, but the title is flat-out wrong. As someone who uses MRI images and works around MRI scanners, this article is about a very different technology (MEG) with very different trade-offs and uses.
MEG, or magnetoencephalography, picks up on very weak magnetic fields produced by the electrical activity of the brain. MEG's primary advantage over EEG, or electroencephalography (where you use electrodes to measure the electrical potential directly) is that the magnetic fields tend to penetrate tissue with less distortion. Thus while it's relatively easy to see what's happening on the surface of the brain with an EEG, you'd need to stick electrodes into the brain to measure deeper activity with EEG, but not MEG. The disadvantage of MEGs is that the magnetic fields are very small, and difficult to measure without getting a lot of noise.
For MRI you are are using a *VERY* strong magnetic field to align the tiny magnetic fields of most of the nuclei in the patient in one direction, and then using radio frequency pulses to knock some of them out of alignment and then measure how long it takes for them to return to alignment (it's a little more complicated than this, but hard to explain well in a single sentence). You are not directly measuring the brain's activity at all, and in a medical context this is mostly used to look at the structure of the body. As it turns out, however, you can detect tiny differences in the amount of blood in different areas, and when you use a part of your brain, the blood flow tends to increase over the next second or two. By measuring this (using fMRI, which stands for functional MRI), you can get an idea of what parts of the brain have been active over the last few seconds. The advantage is that you can measure what's happening in all of the brain, including the very deep parts, without inserting electrodes. The disadvantage is that because you are measuring a slow effect of changes in brain activity (changes in blood flow), you can't see what's happening on a millisecond by millisecond basis.
Calling an MEG machine an MRI machine is kind of like calling hammer a screw driver; there might be some overlap in usage, but they are very different tools that work in different ways.
fMRI not MRI. fMRI "research" is a total scam.
All non-residents will be required to wear these at all times, you know, think of the children, just to be safe...
Bat and ball. Must be a British thing, like cricket, which of course no one really understands, but it has a bat, and a ball, but probably no crickets.
to calibrate the "zero".
It is not an MRI. It's magnetoencephalography, which is very very different than Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It's much more analogous to an EEG (electroencephalography), and a more portable version is is impressive but not nearly as impressive as shrinking the liquid helium-cooled magnets needed for MRI would be.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
...or it gets the hose again.
...that this mask will show up in a doctor who episode.
MEG not MRI.
MEG still sucks for spatial resolution.
Personally, based on the summary text, I'd wait for version 2.