This is an abstract for a presentation given at the Eighth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology . There will be a link from here to the full article when it is available on the web.
Nanotechnology has tremendous potential for advancing medicine.
However, diagnosis has improved greatly, driving progress as clinical trials of new treatments need cohorts of well-characterized patients. MRI has excellent discrimination since instead of densitometry it relies on recording RF emissions stimulated from protons resonating in a high magnetic field by carefully timed pulse sequences. The theoretical maximum resolution of MRI is 100 microns, sufficient to see individual neurons in some parts of the brain, and the technique has been optimized in modern machines to the point where a whole brain volume can be acquired in under 3 seconds. However, CT and MR show only static images of the brain's structure. These scans detect regional blood flow rates which correlate to activity of large neuron populations in the cerebral cortex.