Newswise — ALBUQUERQUE, N.M — It might not start a fashion trend, but Sandia National Laboratories is designing a wearable brain imager.
The National Institutes of Health has granted Sandia $6 million to build the prototype medical device that would make magnetoencephalography (MEG) — a type of noninvasive brain scan — more comfortable, more accessible and potentially more accurate.
“This is the future of MEG,” said Sandia MEG scientist Amir Borna, lead author on a paper describing the proposed system recently in the journal PLOS ONE.
Physicians use MEG to locate the sources of epilepsy, and researchers use it to study brain development, Alzheimer’s disease and stroke. But the procedure requires a person to hold still for long periods under a rigid, helmet-like dome, which can be difficult for children, people with chronic pain and people with motor disorders,…
