"New perspectives for research": a powerful MRI provides images of unprecedented power

Images of a six-year-old child's brain with unprecedented precision: researchers from the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) hope, thanks to a technological innovation, to better understand neurodevelopmental disorders and brain diseases in children.

Installed since 2007 in a CEA research center (Neurospin), on the Saclay plateau (Essonne), the powerful MRI that produced these images already provides images of the adult brain. Adapting this technology for use in children and obtaining the green light from health authorities for this use took several years of research and development, the researchers explained Wednesday during a press conference.

For Dr. David Germanaud, a pediatric neurologist at the Robert Debré Institute for the Child's Brain and a researcher at the CEA, this is a "world first at this level of image technology and safety guarantee."

Thanks to better image resolution and increased contrast, this seven Tesla MRI (a unit of measurement named in honor of Serbian physicist Nikola Tesla) compared to 1.5 or 3 for the MRIs found at the research hospital, allows us to see "the fine details of the brain, vascularization, cerebral metabolism... and its activity on an individual scale," he said.

The goal is to better understand neurodevelopmental disorders and childhood brain diseases.

"In the affected children, whose cognitive functioning is severely affected and whose cerebellum is too small, we have shown that the most affected regions of the cerebellum are regions more involved in motor functioning," explained Dr. David Germanaud.

Thus, at the level of the cerebral cortex, "there may be small malformations responsible for certain childhood epilepsies: when we detect them early, we can, in some of them, suggest surgery, we remove the lesion and cure the epilepsy, and the earlier we do it, the better," explained Dr. David Germanaud.

This advance in imaging opens, according to him, "new perspectives for research on neurodevelopmental disorders and diseases of the childhood brain."

Another example of application: better understanding "another developmental disease, that caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol."

"These children may have physical signs, what we call ' fetal alcohol syndrome ,' but sometimes they don't, but in any case, the alcohol has disrupted their brain development," explained the pediatric neurologist. "We realized that their cerebellum could be malformed," he said.

Also, "the deciphering of the development of cognitive abilities and learning will be able to be considered much more on an individual scale," according to the researchers.

They will notably lead a three-year research project that will study the cerebellum and cerebral cortex of around one hundred children - divided into three groups of around thirty individuals.

The first will be made up of children with epilepsy, the second of children suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and the last will be a control group, allowing the study of healthy cerebellar development.