The role of brain MRI scanning in the newborn

Very sick newborns are at high risk for brain injuries and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. Accurate diagnosis of these injuries and adequate prognostication of future outcome is one of the most difficult tasks confronting caregivers in neonatal intensive care units. In the past several years, there have been tremendous advancements in the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies devoted to studying the newborn brain. MRI is now slowly becoming the new standard of care for evaluating the exact nature and extent of brain injuries in sick newborns, as well as reliably predicting the future prognosis of these newborns. In addition, it is giving unique insights about how brain injuries develop in these patients and how they further impact brain maturation. This will probably help in the future to refine therapeutic strategies offered to these patients, and to evaluate the efficiency of such changes. In this article, we thus review some of the current and future roles of brain MRI scanning in the newborn.