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.

Comments

An active tinfoil hat

[nospam007]

cool!

Re:An active tinfoil hat

[PolygamousRanchKid]

cool!

Well, supposedly this device is only for "scanning", but of course, every bug spray smoking conspiracy theorist absolutely knows that the military is working on hard hacks to turn the device into a mind controller!

Sneak up behind someone, and yell:

"Brain tag! You're it!"

. . . and then plop the device on their head.

Not an MRI

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

MRI or MEG???

[sackvillian]

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.

Re:MRI or MEG???

[Orgasmatron]

I can't tell if the error belongs to CBS News, to the local CBS affiliate in Vermont, or to the PR flack at the university. The article body itself doesn't mention MRI, except to note that Nottingham University "invented" MRI in the early 1970s. I conclude that whoever added the headline failed.

However, the University and CBS News also failed (or failed twice if either of them were the origin of the headline), because both of them had a responsibility to effectively communicate, which they did not do.

NMR was a technique of analytical chemistry by the 1950s. By 1952, machines were capable of providing one dimensional data (as opposed to scalar data about a single sample). It appears that the first two dimensional NMR data was showing up by the 1960s. What happened in the early 1970s was tissue differentiation, mostly from Lauterbur in New York. In the late 1970s, Mansfield in Nottingham developed a planar approach, making the first machines comparable to the machines we use today.

As a "News for Nerds" site, I expect better from slashdot. I expect the editors to be nerds, and I expect nerds to have at least a passing knowledge of what MRI is and the technology inside it. When they see an article like this, I expect a nerd to look at the picture and ask "How did they fit a 1.5 Tesla magnet into that skullcap?" - and then, critically, to look around a bit to see if maybe the moron journalist* who wrote the article got something wrong.

As you say, an improved wearable real-time encephalogram is a big deal. It is just a very different big deal than the one promised in the headline.

(By the way, I use "moron journalist" in the technical sense. On average, journalism majors are right down near the bottom of all standardized test takers who earn degrees. No offense intended - not by me, and not by objective reality.)