The baby MRI: shrinking tech to help save newborn lives

Premature babies are at high risk of brain damage – but many are too fragile to make the journey to an MRI machine for a clearer diagnosis. Soon, thanks to the world’s first mini scanner, they may not need to. Michael Regnier went to watch it at work.

There’s a picture of our first daughter that my wife can’t bear to see. It was taken on Easter Sunday, 2008, the day she was born. Although it was the start of spring, it was snowing in London. Meanwhile, our daughter, just a few hours old, lay on a white blanket in an incubator in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), tubes and wires sprouting out of her.

We’d done everything right – or so we thought. Sophie had gone into labour naturally a week or two before her due date. When we got to the hospital the following morning, a doctor was soon listening to the heartbeats of mother and baby. Something was wrong. The baby’s heartbeat was too slow.

In my memory, the doctor hit a big red button on the wall above the bed. That seems unlikely now, but the effect was the same. Suddenly I was being told to change into scrubs while nurses streamed into the room and started preparing Sophie for an emergency C-section. I was still pulling on the thin blue trousers when they wheeled her bed out of the room and down the hall. A nurse pointed me towards the double doors of the operating theatre. The knot in my stomach got tighter.

Minutes later, Edith was born. She didn’t cry, as babies are supposed to when their first breath fills their lungs. In silence, she was placed on a table under a warming lamp, medical staff around her, blocking our view. At last, she managed a squawk. Someone held her up for us to see her cross little face and then she was whisked away. By the time I went home that evening, Sophie was in the maternity ward recovering from surgery and Edith was in the NICU. Our first night as a family and the three of us all sleeping in different places.

Reference:

• Read a BBC report on this story: “World’s smallest MRI helps tiny babies”
• An annotated drawing of an MRI scanner [PDF] by Wellcome