$1.3 Million Enables MSU to Bring First MRI Unit to Africa

Through donations from Michigan State University (MSU) alumni and individual departments, MSU physician Terrie Taylor has been able to bring the first MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine to Malawi, Africa.

Taylor studies cerebral malaria, but has not been able to study how the disease effects living patients’ brains because the research team hasn’t had access to an MRI. Without an MRI, Taylor has only been able to study the effects in autopsies after the patient has died.

“This will help in so many ways,” Taylor says. “We will use it for the research we do, we’ll be able to use it for everyday patients that come through the hospital, and it will help to attract and retain more doctors to Malawi.”

This is the country’s first MRI, but will serve Mozambique and Zambia, neither of which has an MRI. The technology allows physicians to assess malaria damage before a child dies and is expected to help diagnose a wide range of illnesses that affect the local population.

So far, one of the most significant findings from Taylor’s study is that one-quarter of the children who were thought to have cerebral malaria turned out, on autopsy, to have died of infections, diseases or conditions that were completely unrelated to malaria.

“This calls into question a lot of the work that’s been done on severe malaria to date,” she says. “The studies might have included patients who were not suffering from malaria at all, because the researchers were using case definitions that lacked precision.”

The new MRI unit will service an average of 18 patients a day. The more than $1.3 million in donations got the machine to sub-Sahara Africa, an area of the world that sees more than two million malarial deaths a year.

Source: MSU College of Osteopathic Medicine

Ivy Hughes, development news editor, can be reached here.