Uc Science Today

Advanced image-capturing technology for MRI scanners paired with powerful computers, allow researchers to quickly detect and analyze the smallest changes in brain function after a concussion. Radiologist Pratik Mukherjee of the University of California, San Francisco explains how it works. “With the latest technology that we are starting to apply, we can actually get several images of the brain within one second. So we can image the entire brain in less than a second. And we do it continually during the scan for many minutes so we are getting thousands, even tens of thousands images of the brain, which are snapshots over time of function in the brain and the way different brain regions connected to each other.” In the late 1990s, it used to take the whole day to process much smaller amount of data with the best computers scientists had at the time. “Now we can do the statistics within seconds. So as we are doing the scan, we can start getting the information we need.”