文章基本信息

标题：Brain imaging, the legal process and neurofantasy; can it be cured (by applying the principles of evidence – based medicine)?
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作者：Peter Sandercock ; Joanna Wardlaw
期刊名称：SCRIPT-ed
电子版ISSN：1744-2567
出版年度：2011
卷号：8
期号：2
页码：204-211
DOI：10.2966/scrip.080211.204
出版社：AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law
摘要：Until the latter part of the 20th century, the medical technology that was available to guide the diagnosis and treatment of people with brain disorders could only provide relatively crude information. In 1971, however, Hounsfield1 developed the computed tomographic scanner. It provided, for the first time, images of living brain tissue, and very soon after that became sufficiently reliable that it entered routine clinical practice. Since then, brain imaging techniques have advanced extremely rapidly, and clinicians now have very powerful tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). With techniques such as tractography and functional MRI (fMRI) they can locate and characterise, in great detail, disorders of brain structure, interconnectivity and function. These developments have enabled neuroscientists to explore many of the aspects of the function of the normal human brain that underlie cognition, memory and action. Coverage of these new developments, by both the scientists who promote their work and the media who report them, has not always presented a balanced picture of what the new research findings really mean. Caulfield et al expressed the problem succinctly: