Today@Dal

From Saturday's Weekend Edition of the Chronicle Herald:

The acrid scent of burnt bone hangs over the patient as he lies, awake, on the table.

There’s a dim awareness of the buzz and the sizzle, as the surgeon delicately cuts away a sand dollar-sized piece of the skull. Beneath the flap lies the coiled mass that controls the patient’s ability to speak, to make a fist, to remember what he ate for breakfast.

The patient starts counting; electric currents gently massage the parts of his brain that border the tumour, the surgeon stopping if his patient slurs or falls silent.

It’s only then, in the operating room, that the surgical team knows exactly what parts of this person’s brain control the critical functions of language, comprehension and movement.

But not anymore.

A Nova Scotia physicist has created a computer algorithm that, combined with a functional MRI, can pinpoint the do-not-disturb areas in the brain.

“When we do a functional MRI, what we get is really a movie of the brain,” Tynan Stevens explains. “What my algorithm does is figure out the best way to take that movie and condense it down to a single 3D image that we can bring to the surgeon.

“We can show (the doctor) what part of the brain is controlling that person’s hands, arms, language and speech … So it gives him a map of areas that he has to be really careful around during surgery.”

Read the rest of this story online.