'Brain Bucket' Can See Into Your Brain

May 4, 2009 — -- It may look like something out of a sci-fi film costume closet, but a new brain scanner, affectionately known as the "Brain Bucket," is the latest in the high-tech fight against brain disorders.

Developed and implemented at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the device, officially titled the "multi-channel phased ray coil," is basically a helmet featuring a myriad of sensors and coils connected an magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine.

With the Brain Bucket, the MRI can generate incredibly high-resolution images of the brain up to 10 times faster than older machines -- and sometimes that can mean the difference between life and death.

"It's like we went from a cell phone camera to a 10 megapixel digital camera," Dr. Bruce Rosen, one of the Brain Bucket's creators and Director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center at MGH, told "Good Morning America."

"When you take a picture with a Brain Bucket, it can look literally like you took the brain, slice it up, and we're staring right at it before your eyes," Rosen said.

The key to the new machine is its 96 metal coils, which act as separate receivers to pick up signals from different areas of the brain and translate them into a single, comprehensive image. By contrast, a traditional MRI usually uses only two to 12 coils.

"A small detector close up is more efficient, but it only captures a small part of the brain," Lawrence Wald, a biophysicist at MGH told Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review Magazine. "So you need lots of small detectors spread out over the scalp."

The resulting high-resolution image can show clear images of the brain down to the blood vessels, which allows doctors to catch and treat disorders like brain tumors, dementia and epilepsy. Many times, the abnormality is so small that a normal MRI would have missed it completely.

In a study using an early prototype and epilepsy patients, the new device caught abnormalities that previous brain scans missed in two-thirds of the patients.