Wellcome, GE partnership to explore MRI in newborns

International health charity Wellcome Trust has granted GE Healthcare a Strategic Translation Award for the company’s research into the use of MRI on newborns.

Marking the first collaboration on MRI between Wellcome Trust and GE, the unspecified award will be used to investigate how MRI systems could be placed in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) to provide higher-quality imaging of babies at risk of brain injury. Despite MRI’s superior sensitivity, ultrasound remains the most common imaging modality in newborns, in large part because of the time and risk involved in moving newborns out of NICUs to undergo MRI scanning.

GE and Wellcome hope the research will result in improved speed and accuracy of brain injury diagnoses, which could improve treatment and potentially mitigate the long-term neurological effects of brain injury.

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