121–130 of 133 posts
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Why would they remain fundamentally expensive? It is a fixed machine (so eventually you recoup the investment) and running consumes nothing other than electricity and a paper gown. MRIs cost under $200 in Japan.
Is $200 close to what it costs the hospital, or after subsidies?
Even low-dose ultrasound (what they use on pregnant woman) results in ultrastructural changes in brains [0], specifically at the nodes of Ranvier (the gaps between myelin along axons). See also [1] for a review. [0] Ellisman MH, Palmer DE, André MP (1987), "Diagnostic levels of ultrasound may disrupt myelination," Experimental Neurology 98:78–92 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3308504/ [1] Quarato, C.M.I., Lacedonia,…
Interesting, if ultrasound effects the brain, then maybe specific pattern could be used to non-destructively stimulate it?
/? ultrasound brain stimulation: https://www.google.com/search?q=ultrasound+brain+stimulation
There's ultrasound for Alzheimer's, which may not be about Amyloid Tau;
"Improving Cognition Without Clearing Amyloid: Effects of Tau and Ultrasound Neuromodulation" (2024) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3233/JAD-240616 ... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1746486614029868186...
Also, Beta-Cyclodextrin apparently reverses atherosclerosis in the body and brain - by "absorbing" sugar-alcohol FWIU - and it's already approved but we don't know what dose is low enough to be safe.
Can anyone explain how this ultrasound can see through the skull? I've worked on ultrasound devices and data, the shadows from bone, and distortions caused by tissue types were very difficult. If this device can deal with those distortions it would already be useful for lung imaging.
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Ultrasound can penetrate the skull, esp if through a thin part of the skull (like the temporal bone, which going from the graphic on the website is exactly where they are targeting these waves) and with targeted frequencies. You are misinformed.
I am a consultant radiologist. Tell that to my 6-month old infants who require MRI with GA because their fontanelles are closed. Transtemporal can give you a poorly resolved image of the 3rd ventricle at a pinch. “Targeted frequencies” - righto.
If you believe ultrasound categorically can not penetrate the skull, while the much longer used Weber and Rinne tests clearly demonstrate bone conduction of sounds by placing a tuning fork against the skull, so I wonder how you explain that: audible frequencies can pass but independently defined ultrasound is unable to pass?
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I am a consultant radiologist. Tell that to my 6-month old infants who require MRI with GA because their fontanelles are closed. Transtemporal can give you a poorly resolved image of the 3rd ventricle at a pinch. “Targeted frequencies” - righto.
it's widely accepted that ultrasound applied to the skull is even audible, this was discovered shortly after WWII: Gavreau in 1948 and then Pumphrey in 1950, who proposed the middle ear ossicles simply form a low-pass filter, although the situation is a lot more cloudy to this day: the topotonic relationship or the subjective frequencies don't seem to correspond to their actual frequencies. It's unclear if that is du…
No, of course bone can conduct sound, like any other solid. What I said was ultrasound cannot *effectively* penetrate, ie get a diagnostic image back out in an adult. This is what is being purported here, and is the nonsensical part.
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The methods described in the main article refer specifically to neurovascular imaging. In order to have a higher resolution, they’re making use of microbubbles (which need to be prepared and injected just prior to imaging). There is no world where vascular imaging with a methodology like this is better than what I can do today in a GP clinic with a handheld GE or butterfly (or similar) US probe for anything that matt…
They are claiming to want to detect CTE which normally is only diagnosable in an autopsy, I thought. Can current MRI do that? Right now we get former NFL players offing themselves with gunshots to the chest, intentionally leaving the brain intact for postmortem scanning, so posterity can figure out what was wrong with them. It's painful to think about.
Can MRI/CT demonstrate CTE.
Well, like a lot of things which as alzheimers, that is still a pathological diagnosis for the most part, to the best of my knowledge (not post mortem scanning but out some brain tissue on a slide), but this belies the general fact that getting the tissue diagnosis is really not that important to anyone except a pedant, because yes MRI will show changes in grey/white matter differentiation and size compared to age and sex weighted cohort; and CT will show similar; and in fact it is the history and examination that practically matter to both the patients and their family.
So while it’s nice to have a totally 100% bulletproof ‘diagnosis’ for labelling purposes, practically on history and exam it’s not going to change how they are managed or what they and their family do say to day; given that both CTE and basically any of the dementias don’t have any treatment associated with them, and the current neuro imaging we have can deliver much higher resolution than what this is promising anyway (I mean even CT angio, and it’s not using ‘advanced imaging processes’ to create data out of noise)
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Your country has decided to ration MRIs. Here in Australia, it is a one to two day wait for a MRI. Costs 240 AUD, (160 USD ) for a 1.5 Tesla MRI and AUD 400 for a 3 Tesla MRI just up the road. And if I mark the request Urgent, I can send a patient 5 minutes up the road and have it done within the hour. Are you in the UK ? I know that the UK health system has effectively collapsed, due to that country's poverty and ch…
As an Australian I've had specialists say improved resolution is leading to over diagnosis and over presentation risks. An argument in the margins and one which loses its force as we learn to interpret finer grained imaging better, do you see this as a valid critique? (The case I last heard of was a future blockage/calcification risk in the carotid which the specialist said was way way too young to act on and would n…
As for incidentally found abnormalities, acting on every abnormality is AI level dumb. One has to use Bayesian reasoning and consider risk, context and the likelihood of the lesion being real.
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Scarcity demands some means of rationing out the product. Setting higher prices is one means of doing this, so only those with some means of paying can get it. Another approach is via wait times, where only those who can wait and afford the time penalty can get it. There are other variations, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
The scarcity comes from waiting to get preapproval from your physician and health insurance. If you are willing to pay out of pocket, there are many private MRI clinics that will scan you to your heart's content, as quickly as you want, as long as the payment clears. Granted, anything you find in that reading won't be accepted by your physician or insurance company, so it's more of a checkup for you and you alone. An…
But I was really speaking more broadly, about healthcare in general. There are only so many doctors, so many MRIs, so many heart surgeons, so many this or that. Giving everyone a bunch of extra money so they could pay the current prices doesn't do anything to address the scarcity, so everyone flush with those subsidies will just bid up the prices - which is exactly what happened.