Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

Diffusion Tensor Imaging for Schizophrenia

The Technology Review has (published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has an excellent article on how Kelvin Lim is using a new brain-imaging method to understand schizophrenia.

The article mentions:

"Flipping through a pile of brain scans, a neurologist or psychiatrist would be hard pressed to pick out the one that belonged to a schizophrenic. Although schizophrenics suffer from profound mental problems -- hallucinated conversations and imagined conspiracies are the best known -- their brains look more or less normal.

This contradiction fascinated Kelvin Lim, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, when he began using imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the schizophrenic brain in the early 1990s. Lim found subtle hints of brain structures gone awry, but to understand how these problems led to the strange symptoms of schizophrenia, he needed a closer look at the patients' neuroanatomy than standard scans could provide."

See the full article: Diffusion Tensor Imaging