The Burrill Report


A new $5.7 million National Institutes of Health grant for General Electric and the Mayo Clinic seeks to expand the availability of brain scanning MRI technology beyond hospitals to smaller clinics, where it could help diagnose neurological and psychiatric disorders at lower cost and with greater ease than today.

“Research on this dedicated brain MRI scanner prototype could potentially help expansion of MRI into smaller community hospitals and rural settings, reaching millions more patients globally. We want to bring neurological imaging and care closer to where patients can access it, no matter where they live,” says Thomas Foo, a manager and Chief Scientist for diagnostic and biomedical technologies at GE Global Research.

Whole-body MRI scans, the norm today, come with high power and cooling requirements that generally limit their availability to large hospital settings. As a result, their application is limited in areas where they could have broad positive impacts, such as helping doctors make early diagnoses of stroke, Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, traumatic brain disorder, depression, and autism.

Earlier diagnosis and intervention could have a staggering effect on the cost of treating many diseases. A hypothetical intervention that delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s dementia by five years would result in a nearly 45 percent reduction in the number of people with Alzheimer’s by 2050 alone, suggests The Alzheimer’s Association, reducing the projected Medicare costs of Alzheimer’s to $344 billion dollars from $627 billion today.

Broader availability of easy-to-operate head only scanners could also have a huge positive impact on the field of psychiatry, says Steve Williams, professor of imaging sciences and head of the Department of Neuroimaging at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. “During the past decade, brain imaging research has dramatically improved our understanding of mental illness,” he says. “The creation of dedicated head only MRI system will take our clinical implementation to the next level.”

GE Global Research will develop and complete a prototype system during the next three years, one designed to deliver the same or better quality images than are provided by larger MRI machines, but from a scanner that is only one-third the size and significantly lighter. The prototype will then be assessed at Mayo Clinic, where it will be compared to standard MRI scanners used today.




June 10, 2011
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-nih_backs_portable_brain_scanner_with_5_7_million_grant.html