Lucy, a 3.2-million-year old skeleton of the hominim species Australopithecus afarensis, is among the most famous specimens in anthropology since her discovery in Ethiopia in 1974. A recent report in Nature Communications details how a team used the High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility at Jackson School of Geosciences to scan Lucy for 10 consecutive days.

Neuroscience researchers and clinicians at UCLA have used MR-guided ultrasound to help rouse a recovering coma patient to a more alert state of consciousness. 

Distinguishing between healthy and cancerous cells just might be the biggest hurdle in cancer care physicians have encountered. A new MRI technique developed by radiologists at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas have fixed that problem using zinc.

Remember the literature review claiming that most fMRI exams performed across two and a half decades were, unbeknownst to researchers relying on the findings, riddled with false positives due to deficient software systems?

Its interests sprawl well beyond healthcare, but the Institute for Imaging & Analytical Technologies at Mississippi State University is worth a look from those whose primary work with imaging is in the medical sphere. 

Researchers have used functional MRI (fMRI) to come up with a way to predict neural patterns produced by words within sentences. Building on previous studies that focused on single words lighting up parts of the brain, the team correctly anticipated brain-activity patterns at the sentence level to the tune of 70 percent accuracy, on average.

In order to get his brain scanned, musician Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner had to wait out a power outage. The delay forced him to take the stage for a concert without first doing a soundcheck. But now the entertainer, whom the world knows as Sting, is happy with the results of an fMRI study in which he was the sole subject.

Neuroscience isn’t needed to know that food commercials influence children’s choices of what to eat and how determinedly to demand it. If those ads for sugary, fatty, high-sodium, low-fiber and fun-to-eat products didn’t work, the food and beverage industry wouldn’t be spending $2 billion per year to create and place them.