Researchers illustrate the human brain using ultrasonic sound and laser light

Researchers of Caltech and the University of Southern California have demonstrated a new technology capable of imagining the human brain using laser sound waves and ultrasonic sound waves. Technology is called Tomography or Photoacoustic computerized pact. Previous versions of PACT technology have been used to imagine the internal structure of a rat in a laboratory.

The pact can make other medical uses, including the detection of tumors in human breasts, with a possible alternative to mammograms. Technology has recently been improved by Professor Caltech Lihong Wang, improving his accuracy. The project researchers say that the new improvements make technology so accurate and sensitive, it can detect tiny changes in the amount of blood through a very small blood vessel.

Technology can also be used to detect oxygenation levels in the brain. The project researchers indicate that showing a blood concentration and oxygenation changes can help researchers and health professionals watch cerebral activity and are called functional imaging. When imaging breasts, researchers want to see the blood vessels because they reveal the presence of tumors.

Tumors have chemicals that stimulate the formation of blood vessels. However, measuring the functional modification of imagaled brain activity that varies by a few percent from the baseline base is very difficult. In the past, the functional measurement has only been done using FMRI machines counting on radio waves and magnetic fields of 100,000 times stronger than the magnetic field of the Earth. The problem with these devices is that they are very expensive.

However, the new technology developed by researchers is simple, inexpensive and compact. In particular, the technology developed by Wang and other researchers does not require that patients should be placed inside the machine. It shines a laser light pulse in the head and light shines through the scalp and the skull dispersing to the brain and is absorbed by hemoglobin molecules in red blood cells.

The hemoglobin molecules ultrasoundally vibrate when picking up energy. The vibrations go to the fabric, where they are picked up by an array of 1024 ultrasonic sensors placed around the outside of the head. The data creates a 3D card of the blood flow and oxygenation in the brain after being treated by a computer algorithm.