[throwaway81523]

They are claiming to want to detect CTE which normally is only diagnosable in an autopsy, I thought. Can current MRI do that? Right now we get former NFL players offing themselves with gunshots to the chest, intentionally leaving the brain intact for postmortem scanning, so posterity can figure out what was wrong with them. It's painful to think about.

[robbiep]

My impression isn’t that they are trying to improve CTE imaging (did it say that in the article?!) but somehow approach the resolution of being able to run the blood flow data through a black box so they can demonstrate what the occipital cortex is processing. I mean, that’s literally the first part of the article?

Can MRI/CT demonstrate CTE.

Well, like a lot of things which as alzheimers, that is still a pathological diagnosis for the most part, to the best of my knowledge (not post mortem scanning but out some brain tissue on a slide), but this belies the general fact that getting the tissue diagnosis is really not that important to anyone except a pedant, because yes MRI will show changes in grey/white matter differentiation and size compared to age and sex weighted cohort; and CT will show similar; and in fact it is the history and examination that practically matter to both the patients and their family.

So while it’s nice to have a totally 100% bulletproof ‘diagnosis’ for labelling purposes, practically on history and exam it’s not going to change how they are managed or what they and their family do say to day; given that both CTE and basically any of the dementias don’t have any treatment associated with them, and the current neuro imaging we have can deliver much higher resolution than what this is promising anyway (I mean even CT angio, and it’s not using ‘advanced imaging processes’ to create data out of noise)