A challenge in both procedures has been locating the precise area inside the brain's thalamus to treat - the pea-sized ventral intermediate nucleus, says Dr. Shah.
Traditionally, doctors have relied on either landmarks or maps of the brain drawn from cadavers to help them pinpoint the correct location. However, every brain is different, Dr. Shah says, and tiny errors can lead to damage in surrounding tissue, or to missing portions of the correct target.
Ad Statistics
Times Displayed: 23531
Times Visited: 56 GE HealthCare’s Repair Center Solutions are an ideal complement to your in-house service team. We service a broad range of mobile devices, including monitors and cardiology devices, parts, and portable ultrasound systems and probes.
Three newly refined MRI techniques are better at delineating the target tissue, according to the study.
The most widely studied and perhaps most promising imaging method is called diffusion tractography, says Dr. Shah. It creates precise brain images by taking into account the natural water movement within tissues.
The other methods described are quantitative susceptibility mapping - which creates contrast in the image by detecting distortions in the magnetic field caused by substances such as iron or blood - and fast gray matter acquisition TI inversion recovery - which operates much like a photo negative, turning the brain's white matter dark and its gray matter white in order to provide greater detail in the gray matter.
Dr. Shah and his team plan to participate in a multicenter clinical trial with collaborators at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, testing the diffusion tractography method in patients.
Senior author of the study was Rajiv Chopra, Ph.D., director of image-guided therapy development and associate professor of radiology in the Advanced Imaging Research Center at UTSW. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic also participated in the study.
About UT Southwestern Medical Center
UT Southwestern, one of the premier academic medical centers in the nation, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution's faculty has received six Nobel Prizes, and includes 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 2,500 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in about 80 specialties to more than 105,000 hospitalized patients, nearly 370,000 emergency room cases, and oversee approximately 3 million outpatient visits a year.
Back to HCB News
