Portable Brain Scanner for Earth and Space

Gary Strangman, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Neural Systems Group at Massachusetts General Hospital, is developing a portable brain scanner for use on earth and in space. Inter-cranial hypertension is a problem in micro-gravity, and this portable device will allow for monitoring of blood oxygenation changes and blood volume changes that might be related to elevated pressures.

Transcript

00:00:03 so overall our lab is interested in how the brain adapts to novel environments and it's difficult to carry an MRI scanner to the top of Mount Kil andaro or some place like that so what we've been trying to do is to develop technologies that are small that could actually be uh ported anywhere right now they're actually fairly concerned at Nasa about an intracranial hypertension

00:00:27 problem and basically it means that there's elevated pressures inside the skull why that occurs they don't really know but when you're in microgravity you don't have gravity pulling the fluid out of your head and down into your lower extremities if you look on videos You'll see the full face syndrome of astronauts and so that may be a contributing factor that they've seen is that deforms the

00:00:47 eyeballs and so you get nearsighted in space and currently the only measurement they have for that is ultrasound and it is only a relative measure so it can't give us the kind of direct pressure measurement that we would like so our device will allow us to monitor the blood oxygenation changes and the blood volume changes that might be related to elevated pressures and the idea is you

00:01:11 shine near infrared light into tissue and then from a detector you measure the light that comes out it's completely non-invasive so you can just place it you on the skin but it does allow us to measure the surface of the brain with sensitivity that is pretty close to that of functional MRI I have taken it home and just tested it on on several occasions

00:01:31 um and it is amusing to be able to say have brain scanner will travel the ultimate goal is to have a very low profile sort of sensor net thing that would fit over the head that you could cover easily and comfortably and then just have a separate box that that Clips to your hip or goes in your pocket that does all the recording for you and then we're developing A system that goes with

00:01:50 that that will automatically detect such devices connect with them and acquire the data for your use or for your Physicians personally I'm most excited about being able to do the brain Imaging and the Brain Monitoring in more remote settings where you can take it outside of the neur Imaging Center like we have here and we can go either into homes or we can follow people through a 24-hour

00:02:13 day and we can actually get monitoring more continuously and in more realistic settings and of course very excited about the possibility of space flight and being able to fly this one day [Music]