Report: New MRI technique improves brain scan accuracy

A new MRI technique could allow physicians to more accurately examine brain scans, according to an MIT News report. Researchers at MIT, working with physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions, have developed a way to boost the quality of the brain scans so that they can be used for large-scale studies on the effects of stroke and treatment responses, according to the report. The scans could help researchers discover how genetic factors influence stroke survival, as well as serving as a new approach to understanding disorders such as Alzheimers, MIT News reported. The new scanning approach involves filling in missing data from each patient scan by examining a large number of scans and using them to recreate anatomical features missing form other scans. Once the higher-quality images are generated, researchers can use a set of algorithms to help analyze anatomical features, according to the report. “The key idea is to generate an image that is anatomically plausible, and to an algorithm looks like one of those research scans, and is completely consistent with clinical images that were acquired. Once you have that, you can apply every state-of-the-art algorithm that was developed for the beautiful research images and run the same analysis, and get the results as if these were the research images,” senior author & MIT Professor Polina Golland said, according to the report. During the process, the algorithm can track which pixels emerged fr...
Source: Mass Device - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Imaging Neurological Source Type: news