Seeing inside a child’s brain
The recent posts about the brain have an intriguing slant to them, what to make of the messy porridge between our ears and how it somehow makes us who we are. But brains can sometimes host disease, go wrong . . . It’s every parent’s nightmare. Being told that your child has a brain tumour. And it’s not so long ago that medics only had the option of learning from crude X-rays what was going on, or scarily brutal surgery. Today, however, the latest in brain scanning techniques have revolutionised both diagnosis and treatment.
In this video clip, Dr Andrew Peet, an oncologist at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, says he contributed to The New Optimists because he wanted to tell people about these modern techniques — and those in the pipeline — and the impact they’re having.
In his chapter in the book, he explains how CT scans provided the first breakthrough, followed by magnetic resonance imaging, but now new techniques such as magnetic resonance spectroscopy and other complementary functional imaging techniques are revolutionising our understanding and, crucially for his patients and their parents, the treatment of brain tumours.
You can download his chapter from The New Optimists here: Brain tumour imaging – the dawn of a new era.
PubMed listing of Andrew Peet’s journal articles are here. Google Scholar listings of other journal articles on brain imaging are here.
Dr Andrew Peet is a Reader in the School of Cancer Studies at the University of Birmingham as well as being an Honorary Consultant in the Oncology Department at Birmingham Children’s Hospital.