Even if this technique is much worse (I can certainly believe it is) the price might allow uses that would never be practical with MRI even with the best financial support. For example, ultrasound might be viable for use in GPs or small medical facilities which could never dream of justifying an MRI machine.
This makes more sense than the comment elsewhere here that says $50.
My guess: It would be a basic scan with minimal sequences and low quality at that price.
There is no world where vascular imaging with a methodology like this is better than what I can do today in a GP clinic with a handheld GE or butterfly (or similar) US probe for anything that matters:
- for dvts and thrombus I can already image them
- if it’s in the brain the last thing that is useful for you to do is fuck around in a small clinic when you should be getting to a major tertiary centre as soon as possible
Can MRI/CT demonstrate CTE.
Well, like a lot of things which as alzheimers, that is still a pathological diagnosis for the most part, to the best of my knowledge (not post mortem scanning but out some brain tissue on a slide), but this belies the general fact that getting the tissue diagnosis is really not that important to anyone except a pedant, because yes MRI will show changes in grey/white matter differentiation and size compared to age and sex weighted cohort; and CT will show similar; and in fact it is the history and examination that practically matter to both the patients and their family.
So while it’s nice to have a totally 100% bulletproof ‘diagnosis’ for labelling purposes, practically on history and exam it’s not going to change how they are managed or what they and their family do say to day; given that both CTE and basically any of the dementias don’t have any treatment associated with them, and the current neuro imaging we have can deliver much higher resolution than what this is promising anyway (I mean even CT angio, and it’s not using ‘advanced imaging processes’ to create data out of noise)