Novel technology known as phase-base amplified MRI is the first to capture the brain’s movement in conjunction with a heartbeat, opening the door for earlier detection of brain disorders and abnormalities, researchers from Stanford University and the University of Auckland announced this week.
Mehmet Kurt, PhD, and colleagues first developed the new imaging method at Stanford, where they affixed a pulsometer to a handful of healthy patients and coordinated the timing of their heartbeats with MRIs of their brains. Those visual slices were then put through an algorithm, which was tailored to the motions of blood and spinal fluid coursing through the brain and generate an amplified video of the brain’s motion.
“It’s proof-of-concept,” Kurt, an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, said in a release. “We wanted to see if we could amplify the tiny movements of the brain with every heartbeat and capture that movement as it naturally occurs, so without introducing noise.”
The magnified video the researchers were able to produce retained the spatial characteristics of an MRI—like the skull and all anatomical features at actual scale—but emphasized the pulse-driven motion of the brain alongside the heartbeat.
“You can actually capture the whole head ‘nodding’ in the scanner due to the force of the blood pumping into the brain every time the heart beats,” co-author Samantha Holdsworth, PhD, said in the release.
These movements aren’t easily accessible to the human eye, Kurt et al. said—while the brain moves with each heartbeat, pulses don’t exceed the width of a human hair. To date, phase-based amplified MRI is the first technique to capture and display those movements well. Original methods were proven inferior in the researchers’ study, published this month in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
Amplified MRI achieved fewer errors and better visibility of hard-to-capture areas of the brain, Kurt and colleagues said, like the mid-brain and spinal cord. It was even able to track movement in the frontal cortex, which is resistant to motion.
Now that the technique is proven to be diagnostically applicable, Kurt said he and his team plan to continue to advance the tech in clinical settings.
“Better visualization and understanding of the biomechanical properties of the brain could lead to earlier detection and monitoring of brain disorders,” he said. “It could also help with prevention, as it could lead to the design of better helmets.”
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.