New technique makes brain scans better
People who suffer a stroke often undergo a brain scan at the hospital, allowing doctors to determine the location and extent of the damage. Researchers who study the effects of strokes would love to be able to analyze these images, but the resolution is often too low for many analyses. To help scientists take advantage of this untapped wealth of data from hospital scans, a team of MIT researchers, working with doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital and many other institutions, has devised a way to boost the quality of these scans so they can be used for large-scale studies of how strokes affect different people and how they respond to treatment. “These images are quite unique because they are acquired in routine clinical practice when a patient comes in with a stroke,” says Polina Golland, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “You couldn’t stage a study like that.” Using these...