Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMRI), or magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to visualize internal structures of the body in detail. MRI makes use of the property of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to image nuclei of atoms inside the body. MRI can create more detailed images of the human body than are possible with X-rays. An MRI scanner is a device in which the patient lies within a large, powerful magnet where the magnetic field is used to align the magnetization of some atomic nuclei in the body, and radio frequency magnetic fields are applied to systematically alter the alignment of this magnetization.[1] This causes the nuclei to produce a rotating magnetic field detectable by the scanner—and this information is recorded to construct an image of the scanned area of the body.[2]:36 Magnetic field gradients cause nuclei at different locations to precess at different speeds, which allows spatial information to be recovered using Fourier analysis of the measured signal. By using gradients in different directions, 2D images or 3D volumes can be obtained in any arbitrary orientation.A new study has found hat Sugar makes it easy to detectcancer growth in MRI.
Certain type of sugars are absorbed by the cancer cells more than the healthy cells.
In MRI the area lights up.
If put into practice, this process  could be completed in a local hospital rather than refereed to Specialty Hospitals.
Story:
The new technique, called ‘glucose chemical exchange saturation transfer’ (glucoCEST), is based on the fact that tumours consume much more glucose (a type of sugar) than normal, healthy tissues in order to sustain their growth.
The researchers found that sensitising an MRI scanner to glucose uptake caused tumours to appear as bright images on MRI scans of mice.
Lead researcher Dr Simon Walker-Samuel, from the UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI) said: “GlucoCEST uses radio waves to magnetically label glucose in the body. This can then be detected in tumours using conventional MRI techniques. The method uses an injection of normal sugar and could offer a cheap, safe alternative to existing methods for detecting tumours, which require the injection of radioactive material.”
Professor Mark Lythgoe, Director of CABI and a senior author on the study, said: “We can detect cancer using the same sugar content found in half a standard sized chocolate bar. Our research reveals a useful and cost-effective method for imaging cancers using MRI — a standard imaging technology available in many large hospitals.”
He continued: “In the future, patients could potentially be scanned in local hospitals, rather than being referred to specialist medical centres.”
The study is published in the journal Nature Medicine and trials are now underway to detect glucose in human cancers.
Simon Walker-Samuel, Rajiv Ramasawmy, Francisco Torrealdea, Marilena Rega, Vineeth Rajkumar, S Peter Johnson, Simon Richardson, Miguel Gonçalves, Harold G Parkes, Erik Årstad, David L Thomas, R Barbara Pedley, Mark F Lythgoe, Xavier Golay. In vivo imaging of glucose uptake and metabolism in tumors. Nature Medicine, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nm.3252
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Now Britons can find out if their Ancestors were slave owners  by accessing database where details are listed for compensation was paid to the ‘Owners‘ for losing their ‘possessions!”
Recently there was a huge uproar in India when James Cameron, the British PM refused to apologize for Jalianwallabagh massacre.
I posted a blog observing that if the British were to embark on a process of Apologizing to all those who were wronged during their ‘Grab and Rule Period”, there will be no end !
British Slave ownership.
The Story of Slave Ownership database.
Researchers at University College London spent three years compiling a searchable listing of thousands of people who received compensation for loss of their “possessions” when slave ownership was outlawed by Britain in 1833.
About 46,000 people were paid a total of 20 million pounds — the equivalent of 40 percent of all annual government spending at the time — after the freeing of slaves in British colonies in the Caribbean, Mauritius and southern Africa.
“This is a huge bailout,” said Keith McClelland, a research associate on the project. “Relatively speaking, it is bigger than the bailout of the bankers in recent years.”
Compensation for slave-owners was opposed by some abolitionists, who argued it was immoral, but it was approved as the political price of getting the 1833 abolition bill passed.
The database includes details on the 3,000 compensated slave owners who lived in Britain — rather than its colonies — and includes the ancestors of several present-day politicians and the writers Graham Greene and George Orwell. Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair, and the trustees of his great-grandfather, Charles Blair, were paid 4,442 pounds for 218 slaves on a plantation in Jamaica.
Not all the slave-owners were ultra-wealthy. Middle-class Britons up and down the country were paid compensation — evidence, the researchers say, of how far the tentacles of slavery spread through society.
I have often heard of people seeing Sound, especially when they are engrossed in Listening to Music.
Other case relate to other circumstances.
Why do some people see sounds?
Story:
Seeing Sound.
Past experiments revealed there are strong differences between individuals when it comes to how prone they are to this illusion. “Some would experience it almost every time a flash was accompanied by two bleeps, others would almost never see the second flash,” said researcher Benjamin de Haas, a neuroscientist at University College London.
On average, the volunteers saw the illusion 62 percent of the time, although some saw it only 2 percent of the time while others saw it 100 percent of the time. They found the smaller a person’s visual cortex was — the part of the brain linked with vision —the more likely he or she experienced the illusion.
“If we both look at the same thing, we would expect our perception to be identical,” de Haas told LiveScience. “Our results demonstrate that this not quite true in every situation — sometimes what you perceive depends on your individual brain anatomy.”
The researchers suggest this illusion could reveal a way the brain compensates for imperfect visual circuitry.
“The visual brain’s representation of what hits the eye is very efficient but not perfect — there is some uncertainty to visual representations, especially when things happen quickly, like the rapid succession of flashes in the illusion,” de Haas said. “We speculate that this kind of uncertainty is bigger in brains that dedicate a smaller proportion of neurons to visual areas, just like a camera with fewer megapixels will give you a lower image quality.”
“If this speculation holds, it would make perfect sense for smaller visual brains to make more use of the additional information provided by the ears,” de Haas explained. “In the real world, sources of light and sound are often identical, and combining them will be advantageous. Imagine you take a twilight walk in a forest and scare up some animal in the undergrowth. The best strategy for finding out whether you are dealing with a hedgehog or a bear will involve combining visual information, like moving twigs and branches, with auditory information, like cracking wood.”
Much remains unknown about the roots of this illusion. For instance, only about a quarter of the individual differences regarding the illusion could be explained by brain anatomy. “We still haven’t explained the rest,” de Haas said.
Future research can also explore “whether the relationship between visual cortex size and audiovisual perception is specific to this illusion or holds for other audiovisual illusions as well,” de Haas said.
Scientists who scanned the brains of men convicted of murder, rape and violent assaults have found the strongest evidence yet that psychopaths have structural abnormalities in their brains.
The researchers, based at King’s College London‘s Institute of Psychiatry, said the differences in psychopaths’ brains mark them out even from other violent criminals with anti-social personality disorders (ASPD), and from healthy non-offenders.
Nigel Blackwood, who led the study, said the ability to use brain scans to identify and diagnose this sub-group of violent criminals has important implications for treatment.
The study showed that psychopaths, who are characterized by a lack of empathy, had less grey matter in the areas of the brain important for understanding other peoples’ emotions.
While cognitive and behavioral treatments may benefit people with anti-social personality disorders, the same approach may not work for psychopaths with brain damage, Blackwood said.
“To get a clear idea of which treatments are working, you’ve got to clearly define what people are like going into the treatment programs,” he said in a telephone interview.
Essi Viding a professor in the psychology and language sciences department of University College London, who was not involved in Blackwood’s study, said it provided “weighty new evidence” about the importance of distinguishing psychopathic from non-psychopathic people rather than grouping them together.
The findings also have implications for the justice system, because linking psychopathy to brain function raises the prospect of arguing a defense of insanity.
Interest in what goes on inside the heads of violent criminals has been sharpened by the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who massacred 77 people last July.
Two court-appointed psychiatric teams who examined Breivik came to opposite conclusions about his mental health. The killer himself has railed being called insane.
Blackwood’s team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 44 violent adult male offenders in Britain who had already been diagnosed with anti-social personality disorders.
The crimes they had committed included murder, rape, attempted murder and grievous bodily harm.
Of the 44 men scanned, 17 met the diagnosis for ASPD plus psychopathy and 27 did not. The researchers also scanned the brains of 22 healthy non-offenders.
The results showed that the psychopaths’ brains had significantly less grey matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles than the brains of the non-psychopathic offenders and non-offenders.
These areas of the brain are important for understanding other people’s emotions and intentions, and are activated when people think about moral behavior, the researchers said.
Damage to these areas is linked with a lack of empathy, a poor response to fear and distress and a lack of self-conscious emotions such as guilt or embarrassment.
Lindsay Thomson, a professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in this study, said Blackwood’s findings add to evidence that psychopathy is a distinct neurodevelopmental brain disorder.
Research shows that most violent crimes are committed by a small group of persistent male offenders with ASPD.
In England and Wales, for example, around half of male prisoners meet diagnostic criteria for ASPD. A major review of studies covering 23,000 prisoners from 62 countries conducted in 2002 found that 47 percent had anti-social personality disorder.
Such people typically react in an aggressive way to frustration or perceived threats, but most are not psychopaths, the researchers wrote in a summary of their study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal.
There are clear behavior differences among people with ASPD depending on whether they also have psychopathy. Their patterns of offending are different, suggesting the need for a separate approach to treatment.
“We describe those without psychopathy as ‘hot-headed’ and those with psychopathy as ‘cold-hearted’,” Blackwood explained.
“The ‘cold-hearted’ psychopathic group begin offending earlier, engage in a broader range and greater density of offending behaviors, and respond less well to treatment programs in adulthood compared to the ‘hot-headed’ group.”
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