New device at Kaiser Redwood City reveals precise brain images

A machine that provides high-quality images of brain activity and functions was recently installed at Kaiser Permanente’s new Redwood City Medical Office building.

The Magnetoencephalography machine – nicknamed the MEG - arrived in 18 large wooden crates. The machine – one of a handful now in California - provides doctors with ultra-high quality data which is converted to images of brain activity by detecting tiny electro-magnetic currents our brains produce.

A MEG image shows doctors images where brain activity is taking place, for example, during a seizure or when the brain is involved in a thought. Think, for example, the parts of the brain involved in making a fist.

”It’s a device that we’re going to use to precisely evaluate normal and abnormal activity in the brain, “ said Mark Sedrak, MD, Director of Functional Neurosurgery at Kaiser Permanente Redwood City. “ It will be used for brain mapping and epilepsy detection, sort of like high resolution GPS for the brain”.

There was a certain excitement as tech crews began opening the 18 wooden crates and putting Kaiser Permanente’s new MEG together.

When finished, the MEG looks a little like a very large salon hair dryer setup: the patient sits in a comfortable chair, the patients head is in a recess that nearly surrounds the skull.

Highly sensitive superconducting electronic circuits in the MEG’s recess detect brain activity while the patient is awake and being recorded in in real time. The powerful MEG images will give Kaiser Permanente surgeons a much clearer picture of where functions in the brain are located.

“We’ll be able to directly see where the seizure is focused or where critical structures of the brain are, such as speech and motor functgion,” Sedrak said. “It will precisely guide our diagnostic and treatment plans.”

The MEG will be in Kaiser Permanente Redwood City’s new medical office when it opens early in 2021.