The MRI systems are undergoing an improvement that will allow them to be used also in emergency medicine and not only when there is plenty of time for an hour's imaging
LARRY GREENMEIER, Translation: Avi Blizovsky, for InformationWee
Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/greenmeier001.html
Information technology may soon solve the mysteries of the human mind. This will happen much faster than you think. By increasing the computing power of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices, Scottish researchers hope to expand the functionality of
The MRI and turning it from a research tool into a tool that helps diagnose problems. Anyone who has undergone an MRI examination knows that it is not a short examination, as the photograph itself lasts at least an hour, so it is difficult to use it as a tool to examine an injured person in a car accident, for example, and it is suitable to be used as a tool to examine the brain function of a person who is not in danger at that particular moment.
MRI devices have been functioning for about ten years for the purpose of studying brain function. A healthy patient enters the system and it preserves his brain wave structure. But with real-time imaging systems and processors working in parallel, researchers hope to cut the time it takes to create MRI images from hours to minutes, says Nigel Goddard, project manager at the Center for Interactive Imaging Analysis in Edinburgh, Scotland.
"As more and more clinical trials are done, the MRI will become a routine tool that can help in psychiatry," he says. "The more time and higher computing power you have, the more accurate a map of brain activity you can get."
Faster analysis of the data and its retrieval can help developing fields of treatment, such as biofeedback, where researchers put patients into a system when they are in a state of depression, to map their brain activity and try to increase or decrease the activity of certain areas of the brain.
"If we could do that, it would have medical implications, particularly for people with anxiety," says Goddard. The goal: to give the patients the biofeedback maps while they are on the MRI table.
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~302162618~~~174&SiteName=hayadan
