Infant brain scanner probes neural development

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a vital part of medical research and diagnosis in adults, but it is technically difficult to perform in children and infants. Subjects must be completely still and it can be an intimidating, noisy and claustrophobic experience even for adults.

Dr Sean Deoni, lead researcher of the project at King’s College London, explained how they overcame these hurdles.

‘The babies come in with their families around an hour before we hope to scan and we put them into a private room where they can relax. When the baby finally falls asleep after feeding we gently move them in to the scanning room.

‘In terms of the scanner itself we’ve put a soundproofing insulator inside the bore, this allows us to absorb some sound giving a couple of decibels reduction and we use some special noise attenuating headphones that go around their ears.’

But the crucial modification was slowing down the actual process of acquiring the image, because the faster the data capture the louder the scanner is. This allowed them to get noise levels down to around 60 decibels, equivalent to a normal human conversation, which infants can easily sleep through. The down-side is that scan time goes up dramatically by a factor of two, but Deoni said this can be offset by being more selective about what data to capture.