A moving story

An MRI scanner has been adapted to capture moving as well as still images for the first time.

UK researchers have taken images of diseased body parts in four dimensions — time, width, height and depth. The images will help clinicians diagnose diseases in constantly moving vital organs, such as the heart and the lungs. At present, still MRI scans of moving bodily organs appear blurred.

Computer models that describe how the organs move are overlaid on still images taken from MRI scans. By combining the two, researchers are able to scan moving parts.

The researchers are also building models to describe how different organs should behave when they are functioning normally, said Prof David Hawkes, director of the five-university Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) specialising in improving medical images. ‘In near-imaging we are able to build detailed models of certain structures within the brain and use them to automatically drive brain images, such as for the study of dementia.’