Will a psychiatrist ever scan your brain to diagnose and treat you?
When parents learn about Michael Milham’s research, they often ask him, “Can you give my child a brain scan to figure out what’s wrong with them?”
Milham treats his young patients like any other child psychiatrist would: He observes and interviews them, assigns them diagnoses, and prescribes courses of treatment. But unlike many psychiatrists, Milham is also a scientist—he is vice president of research at the Child Mind Institute—and an expert on functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, a tool that allows researchers to measure levels of activity across the brain.He understands why parents want him to scan their children’s brains.
fMRI is a younger cousin of the more-familiar structural MRI—the sort of scan you might get if you come into the hospital with an injured knee. Whereas structural MRI maps out the locations of different body tissues, functional MRI detects levels of oxygen in the blood. Working cells need oxygen, so a high blood oxygen level suggests that a brain region is active.
Neurosurgeons might examine their patients using fMRI to map out different regions of their brains before operating, but psychiatrists aren’t sticking anyone into a scanner.Which is not to say that fMRI has nothing to do with psychiatry at all. Since the invention of fMRI, scientists have been scanning mentally ill people’s brains to try to figure out what’s different about them.
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