Boston researchers get $20m from US to improve scanning
The federal government announced yesterday that it is giving Boston researchers nearly $20 million to figure out how to make scanning machines detect diseases sooner and treat patients faster.
Brigham and Women's Hospital will use the grant to forge a national alliance of scientists to refine scanning technology, and, crucially, to make those refinements available to any interested researcher.
"The tools we're after would make diseases detectable at earlier stages when they're more curable," said Dr. Steven Seltzer, chairman of radiology at Brigham and Women's.
Led by the Brigham's Dr. Ron Kikinis and Stephen Wong, researchers will hunt for ways to improve the software that interprets magnetic resonance, computerized tomography, and other images.
"Right now, the information is very subjective," Wong said.
So the scientists will be looking for ways to standardize that information and, in some cases, to fuse images derived from different machines into a single picture, providing physicians with a clearer understanding of a patient's illness.
They also hope to enable the scanners to accomplish tasks that would overwhelm the human mind -- and eye.
Now, an MRI of a patient with multiple sclerosis would typically yield a field of bright spots indicating areas in the brain where the sheathing of nerves has been damaged. But doctors using the naked eye find it challenging to judge degrees of brightness and track subtle changes over time from such images. Researchers hope that they can refine the software to do what the doctor can't.
The scientists also hope to compare massive numbers of scans at once, looking for patterns that might yield insights into problems like schizophrenia.
And whatever they find over the next five years will be made widely available to scientists, Wong said.
"Now some of the software out there is quite good, but unfortunately it's locked in by the vendors and becomes proprietary," he said. "With this grant, all of the information will be open to everybody."
