MRI of the brain This is a very useful method in both research and medical diagnostics. Thanks to it, you can detect everything from brain hemorrhages to tumors, inflammation, infections and many other anomalies. Significant progress has been made since it began to be used in the 1970s, but nothing as powerful as what the team of French and German scientists has just achieved has ever been achieved with this technology. Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) from France.
This is the most powerful MRI of the brain ever performed. The machine in question, called Isolt, creates a magnetic field 11.7 Tesla. To put this figure into perspective, conventional scanners generate maximum 3 Tesla. As a result, images were obtained using this new machine 10 times more accurate than usual.
Thanks to this, among other structures, you can see the smallest blood vessels that supply the cerebral cortex and the smallest details of the cerebellum. All this remained invisible in conventional images, according to these scientists. Agence France Pressealso assembled Science Alert.
History of brain MRI
Before we talk about MRI of the brain, we need to talk about nuclear magnetic resonance (MRI) All in all. This is a physical phenomenon first described in 1938 by the American physicist Isidore Isaac Rabi. Using molecular beams, he noticed that if molecules are exposed to a magnetic field, the nuclei of atoms with an odd number of protons and neutrons react with attractive forces that finally cease during a phase known as relaxation. A few years later, in 1946, physicists Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell They went a little further, demonstrating the same phenomenon in liquids and solids.
What applications might this phenomenon have?
The year was 1971, when an American doctor Raymond Damadian found that relaxation times in cancerous tissues differ from those in healthy tissues. So he invented a device in which tissue was exposed to a magnetic field and the signals emitted by the atoms were measured to calculate relaxation times and determine whether they were healthy tissue or tumors. Thus was born the first MRI machine, patented in 1972.
But it would be much more useful if these signals could somehow be seen. This is where the chemical comes into play. Paul Lauterbur, which a year later obtained the first images in 2 and 3 dimensions. He achieved this by applying gradients. That is, additional magnetic fields were used, the intensity of which varies in different areas of the body. Therefore, if, for example, an MRI of the brain was performed, not only would different signals emitted by healthy or cancerous tissue be detected. They can also be transferred to a photographic plate, which captures reactions of varying intensities corresponding to different brain structures. Moreover, this has already made it possible to go beyond tumors and detect many other types of anomalies.
Later physicist Peter Mansfield He used a mathematical model that made it possible to obtain images that would normally take hours to obtain in seconds. Subsequently, some modifications have been made to improve the scanner, but in general, MRI of the brain, like those that analyze other tissues, is essentially the same. Thanks to this, many diseases can be identified, but what has been achieved now is unprecedented.
More accurate images than ever
Scientists around the world have been trying to improve MRI of the brain for many years, but CEA employees were the first to conduct tests on humans. They have a machine consisting of a cylinder 5 meters long and highexposed to a magnetic field 132 ton magnet. In addition, this is ensured by 1500 amp coil. This is a colossal scanner that has already been tested in 2021 on a pumpkin. The results were successful, but extrapolating pumpkin to the human brain is clearly difficult.
Once they got the green light for human trials, they hired 20 volunteers scan their brains. The resulting images are so detailed that they are ready to run further tests. At the moment, the volunteers participating in the study are healthy people. However, his idea is that in the future it could be used in patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or depression, among other conditions.
You could see how brain tissue changes in these diseases or even how medications are distributed throughout the brain. Initially, an MRI of his brain would only have research goals, but perhaps it can be used for diagnostics in the future. Moreover, they believe that some diseases that require early diagnosis can be detected much earlier.
After that, the scientists who have made the most progress with the new brain MRI machine will move on to work. USA and South Korea. But they haven’t tested it on humans yet. This field has a bright future, and the good results are just beginning.
Source: Hiper Textual
