A newborn baby,
well fed and sleepy, is swaddled in a blanket and lying on what looks like a
tea tray with a helmet attached to one end. Once the infant falls asleep,
researchers pull special tabs on the blanket to ease the baby into the helmet.
It is a customized receiver coil used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a
common method for visualizing brains in living people. The researchers slide
the baby-holding contraption along a special trolley into the MRI tube and
start collecting images.
From about 1,000
such scans, and another 500 of developing fetuses, UK scientists in the
Developing Human Connectome Project plan to map how regions of the brain
communicate with each other during development. They then hope to work out why
preterm babies are at risk for conditions such as autism spectrum disorder or
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and perhaps to do similar scans to
check whether methods to prevent such disorders are working.
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