Physicians are encouraged to look at brain scan data in a new way. According to a study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, doctors should be able to analyze the development of a child’s brain and also keep track of any possible psychological or developmental disorders after a typical five-minute scan.
“Pediatricians regularly plot where their patients are in terms of height, weight and other measures, and then match these up to standardized curves that track typical developmental pathways,” says senior author Bradley Schlaggar, MD, PhD, a Washington University pediatric neurologist and the A. Ernest and Jane G. Stein Associate Professor of Neurology.
“When the patient deviates too strongly from the standardized ranges or veers suddenly from one developmental path to another, the physician knows there’s a need to start asking why.”
Schlaggar and his colleagues propose a new way of looking at brain scanning data that moves beyond observing the brain from only a structural point of view. This would be especially helpful in the monitoring and treating of patients with psychiatric and developmental disorders.
According to Schlaggar, he has sent children with obvious, profound psychiatric conditions for MRI scans and received results marked “no abnormalities noted.”
“That’s typically looking at the data from a structural point of view—what’s different about the shapes of various brain regions,” he adds. “But MRI also offers ways to analyze how different parts of the brain work together functionally.”
The study is featured this week in Science.
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