Courtesy of University of Illinois, Chicago
A powerful new magnetic resonance imaging machine at the University of Illinois generated this cross-section of a kiwi. Researchers will apply the scanner to humans after several technical and regulatory requirements are satisfied. The MRI machine, which uses a 9.4 Tesla magnet, should eventually elucidate abnormal brain patterns in psychiatric patients.
Psychiatrists can draw upon long clinical experience with adult patients to surmise why antidepressant medications foster suicidal thoughts and behavior in some children, as the US Food and Drug Administration warned this fall. Treatment often restores a person's ability to act purposefully, including self-destructively, before it improves his or her mood. In the weeks separating these two stages, a few desperately sad but resolute patients are attracted to suicide. Unfortunately, doctors have no systematic way to judge who is in danger.
Brain imaging might eventually provide such a test. For 20 years, psychiatrists ...
