New brain scanner can see brain's electrical operations
January 2006Scientists at The University of Manchester are developing a portable brain scanner which is directly sensitive to the brain's electrical operation, allowing the screening of large sections of the population as well as enabling prompt action to be taken in emergencies. The technology, based on Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), is fast and directly sensitive to the brain's deep electrical activity.
Brain scanners are not available in every hospital due to their prohibitive cost. Where they are available, they are large and noisy fixed installations. The result is that there is usually a long waiting list for patients to be scanned.
With growing concern over neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, there is a greater need than ever before for large numbers of patients to be routinely scanned.
Present-day scanners are not actually directly sensitive to the brain's electrical operation, so resulting diagnoses may be inconclusive. Additionally, many subtle effects that occur on timescales shorter than one second are not registered.
Professor Hugh McCann of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Dr Chris Pomfrett of the School of Medicine based in the Department of Anaesthesia at Manchester Royal Infirmary have been awarded a grant of £280,000 from the Wellcome Trust for a three-year project to design, build and trial a prototype brain imager and test its use in clinical diagnosis, drug trials, and neuroscience research.
This new and patented technique uses EIT, an electrical scanning system with no moving parts, synchronised to an Evoked Response system that stimulates brain function, and is known as fEITER. Pilot studies of fEITER have yielded images of brain function less than half a second after stimulating the patient. The new prototype will be computer-linked to existing viewing systems and it will be used to attract both early research customers and investors who will fund its mass manufacture.
fEITER offers the prospect that every clinic will have a brain scanner for preliminary scans, and it could be taken to wherever the patient is, even at home.
