What's Your Baby Thinking?

Reported December 2007

ST. LOUIS (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- When doctors want to find out what's going on inside a baby's brain it usually requires, noisy or dangerous equipment and babies sitting completely still. But, new technology is now giving researchers a fascinating look inside an infant’s brain in a much easier way.

Radiologists are using a new technique to see what parts of a baby’s brain are working during any given task. Their method is baby-friendly with no exposure to radiation or loud machines.

“It has a more wearable cap so it can be placed in infants heads while they sit in their parents lap,” Joseph Culver, Ph.D., Washington University Medical School said.

Culver and his colleagues improved a brain imaging technique called high-density diffuse optical tomography. It measures how much blood and oxygen are in the brain.

“It’s similar to taking a flashlight and putting it on one side of your hand and looking at the light come through your hand so the light has traveled through your hand and the light that you detect on the other side tells you something about what’s inside your hand,” Dr. Culver said.

Fiber optic cables on the cap shine light on the baby’s brain. The light scatters revealing blood flow related to brain activity in a 3D tomographic image. You can see it in action, when a patient watches a flickering light; a similar rotating pattern shows up in the brain’s blood flow.

“There’s an increase in blood flow to that area and that allows us to map that neuron activity,” Dr. Culver said.

Future uses for the cap include researching brain development in the tiniest of babies … or monitoring a baby’s brain during surgery.

The American Association of Physicists in Medicine and the Optical Society of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

The Parkinsons Institute
675 Almanor Avenue
Sunnyvale, California 94085-2934
(800) 655-2273 or (800) 786-2958

Martha Heil
American Institute of Physics
For the American Association of Physicists in Medicine
(301) 209-3088
mheil@aip.org

For more information about light and its use in medical technology:

Optical Society of America
(202) 223-8130
http://www.osa.org
info@osa.org

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