Virtual Reality 3D Brain Helps in Understanding Migraine Pain

Researchers at University of Michigan rotate and slice through a large, floating hologram-like 3D brain to learn how our brains produce natural pain killing chemicals during migraine attacks. The 3D brain is a novel way to examine data from images taken during a patient's actual migraine attack, says Alexandre DaSilva, who heads the Headache and Orofacial Pain Effort at the UM School of Dentistry and the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute. Different colors in the 3D brain give clues about chemical processes happening during a patient's migraine attack using a PET scan, or positron emission tomography, a type of medical imaging.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] the 3D lab is here to serve the U ofm community so anyone can come in use our resources get expertise and be guided along this complicated path of taking their data or taking their interest and bring them to realization I've been studying the brain and all the mechanism relate to pain for 15 years if you know better what's happened in the brain so

00:00:31 you can be more precise with the treatment your target specific areas that associated with the the migraine [Music] attack basically you're seeing things floating in space all around you I can rotate the brain cut through the brain everything in just few seconds and something that I could not do in uh Tod we are looking for areas in the

00:01:02 brain that are activated and release releasing endogenous opioids the painkillers our own resources during the migraine attack how that occurs and where the brains fighting with the ongoing pain but of course it's not successful it's not only the pain but also all the suffering related to the nausea vomiting and all things across their lives that start sometime when

00:01:31 they are 12 years old 13 and go all the way when they are already grandparents it really affect the quality of life every day we have something new that we can learn and also help the patients [Music]