By Cathleen Rineer-Garber, Office of the Vice President for Health Sciences
Yoshio Okada, PhD (photo)

Yoshio Okada, PhD, began his quest to understand the relationship between the brain and the mind as a psychology student more than 30 years.

While completing his doctoral studies at Rockefeller University in New York, he was introduced to magnetoencephalography (MEG)—at that time a very new technology used to measure the brain’s magnetic fields. For Okada, this was a pivotal moment.

“I had been always interested in understanding how the human mind works, but I was beginning to realize that behavior was not enough to understand the mind,” he says. “When I heard a lecture on MEG, I realized immediately that it could link brain and mind.”

During the next 25 years, MEG technology evolved into a state-of-the-art neuroscience tool. MEG, which uses measurements from an array of superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) to make inferences about neural activity inside the brain, can detect a change of energy as much as 10 billion times weaker than the electromagnetic energy that moves a compass needle.

In medicine, says Okada, MEG is useful because the skull and scalp are transparent to magnetic fields. “By placing magnetic field sensors just above the scalp, it is possible to measure brain activity almost as if the skull and scalp are not there.” However, the magnetic field is too weak for today’s MEG sensors to detect ongoing brain activity without resorting to signal averaging. Signal averaging, says Okada, can result in some loss in information.

About 10 years ago, after joining the faculty at the UNM Health Sciences Center, Okada realized that MEG could be very useful for observing the brain of an infant and understanding how the human brain develops as a child grows. The skull and scalp of an infant are very thin. By placing MEG sensors just above the scalp, it makes it possible to measure brain activity as if the sensors are right over the brain surface without signal interference caused by the skull and scalp—and without the need for signal averaging.

This observation led to the invention of an MEG instrument called babySQUID®. In collaboration with Tristan Technologies, Inc., in San Diego, Okada developed this concept and successfully obtained funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a prototype. The prototype is now being evaluated at Carrie Tingley Hospital.

Okada, who is Professor of Neurology and Director of UNM Biomedical Research and Integrative Neuroimaging (BRAIN) Center, believes that he will be able to use BabySQUID® to see how each part of the brain develops and how different regions of the brain begin working together as a baby develops. He hopes it will enable early diagnosis of various brain disorders, including epilepsy and cerebral palsy, in children.

Early diagnosis of many neurological disorders could have profound implications for patients, says Okada. With epilepsy, for example, early diagnosis could significantly reduce the extent of damage caused to the brain and drastically improve the affects of treatment.

The need for safe and effective tools to diagnose neurological conditions in children has become more critical in recent years, as medical advances have increased the survival rates for children suffering from these disorders. Because it is safe and completely non-invasive, Okada hopes his invention will become a routine screening tool for all newborns at risk of neurological disorders.


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