A brand new human life may just have been saved thanks to the combined technologies of MRI and 3D printing. Dr. Emile Bacha, a surgeon at Morgan Stanley Hospital in Manhattan, used a novel technique to operate on a two-week-old baby with congenital heart defects (CHD). Ordinarily, surgery to repair complicated heart deformations would require opening up the patient’s chest and stopping the heart just to study the defects of that specific heart before they can even begin repairing it.

Each heart with CHD has its own set of holes, and with non-invasive imaging techniques it’s difficult to map out exactly what will need to be fixed during surgery. Dr. Bacha and his team took MRI images of the baby’s heart and used them to create a 3D map of the organ. They then studied it in detail and practiced on the 3D printed replica. They knew exactly what to do before they even began the operation.

Dr. Bacha described the 3D printed heart as a “road map” repairing the maze that was the abnormal heart. Rather than opening up the chest to study the heart and then later performing a second operation to repair it, they were able to accomplish the life-saving surgery in just one operation. This type of achievement is just one example of how 3D printing is already changing the world. For the tiny patient’s family, the ready availability of 3D printing technology literally changed their lives forever.

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If TV shows and movies are to be believed, families of people in a vegetative state spend hours upon hours at the patient’s bedside, having one-sided conversations in the hopes that the patient will understand them on some level. According to research being carried out in hospitals around the world, the idea that people in a vegetative state are still at least partially aware is not complete fiction. Recently, a vegetative-state patient in Canada was able to communicate with doctors via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Scott Routley has been considered in a vegetative state for more than ten years. After just one year in a vegetative state, the condition is said to be permanent. Doctors used to believe that patients in a persistent or permanent vegetative state had no real level of awareness or cognitive function, but Scott Routley might be key in changing that perception. His doctors asked him to imagine certain physical actions in response to yes-or-no questions, with a different action representing each answer.

After putting Scott into an MRI machine and asking him questions, it was clear that Scott’s brain was active. He was imagining the actions that corresponded to the “yes” or “no” answers. And for the first time ever, doctors were able to ask a patient in a vegetative state whether he was in any physical pain. Scott’s answer, to the relief of his medical team, was no. While it is fascinating to know that patients in a persistent vegetative state still retain cognitive function, it re-opens the perpetual debate about such patients’ right to die. Perhaps in the future, doctors will be able to ask the patients directly what their wishes are.

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If you’ve ever wanted to learn to play the piano or dance the tango but couldn’t be bothered to practice, the future is the place you want to be. A study published in Science Magazine suggests that the type of instant download-type learning seen in the Matrix movies really is possible. Using decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to tweak a subject’s brain waves, scientists can match brain waves to a previously-determined target state. The method could be used to more or less insert knowledge directly into a subject’s brain through the visual cortex, bypassing all of the months of practice and learning curves.

The method only works on skills that involve a large degree of visual performance. The visual learning areas of our brains are responsible for keeping track of information learned over time through practice and forming it into performance-based skill. So artificially inducing a certain activation pattern in the brain that matches the pattern of someone who already has that skill can actually make us better at something almost instantly. Oddly enough, the method works even when the subject isn’t aware of what they are being “taught.” Testing subjects’ abilities before and after neurofeedback training showed that their performance in targeted tasks improved even when they were not informed what task they were to be tested on. The thought of a future where we learn everything via brain wave manipulation is a little too creepy to ponder, but hopefully this research can be used to help people with learning disabilities.

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People have always been afraid of technology doing scary things like taking over the world or reading our thoughts. A research group at UC Berkeley is actually trying to make that second one happen with technology that combines functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with computational models to actually see what people are thinking about. It’s the kind of freaky technology that Hollywood blockbusters are made of – and it’s 100% real.

The researchers say that the technique could be used in the future to tap into the minds of coma patients or to share things that no one else can see such as our dreams or memories. But right now, in the infant days of the technology, it can only be used to reconstruct movie trailers the subjects recently watched. Still, taking images from a brain and reconstructing them on a screen is pretty impressive.

To conduct the experiment, the researchers developed a huge database of random YouTube clips. They then associated these clips with brain activity patterns based on previous brain-watching sessions with the fMRI machine. Once the database of images and brainwave activity was established, it was only a matter of feeding brain scans into the software. The software picked out the 100 clips most likely represented by the brainwaves and layered them together into a single video for each scan. We might be a couple of decades away from using this technique to communicate with comatose patients, but this demonstration is so cool it’s spooky.

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