New 3-D Brain Scan Technology

The brain is a complicated part of the body that requires very careful attention when being worked on by medical professionals. Because of that, medical researchers are always trying to find new ways to make brain surgery go more smoothly. This includes not only implementing new tools during surgical procedures but also developing new imaging methods that will make working on the brain easier for all of the professionals involved. To that end, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is exploring what it can do with Diffusions Tensor Imaging (DTI) in brain scans for tumor removal.

"This method provides images with more detail than conventional MRI imaging, allowing doctors to better map out a tumor's proximity to nerve tracts and plan the dissection. DTI captures information about water diffusion within fiber tracts. The technique provides colorful images of the brain showing 3-D views of the tumor and the nerve tracts."

The difficulty of brain surgery comes from the complexity of the brain. There are so many different parts of the brain that control function in the body and each of them is important. To remove a tumor without causing loss of various functions of the body, it is necessary to stay away from all of these different critical parts of the brain. The new DTI imaging should help to make that an even more improved process than MRI imaging did for us in the past. photo link