Scanning the Brain

Holly Jane Hyde, daughter of a Rhode Island chicken and apple farmer, had been a lively youngster and, with her brilliant coppery hair, was as bright as a new penny. But when, at seven, Holly went into second grade, she had trouble with reading. Then Holly's mother noticed that sometimes she seemed not to understand what was said to her; she gazed vacantly into space and occasionally picked up her luncheon sandwich and tossed it across the room for no evident reason.

At first the doctors could not be sure of the reason, either. It might be the petitmal form of epilepsy, or a brain tumor. At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Neurosurgeon William H. Sweet tried the electroencephalogram ("brainwave machine") and got indications of a local disorder, but nothing definite enough to justify major brain surgery. Another standard test (in itself fairly drastic), involving the injection of air into the brain cavities, showed nothing. Not long ago Holly Hyde would have had to wait for her condition to worsen, imperiling her understanding of language and perhaps endangering her life, before the doctors could have felt certain of what to do.

But Dr. Sweet had worked with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Physicist Gordon Brownell to develop a scanning machine that shows, with a high degree of accuracy, not only whether a brain tumor is present but, if so, precisely where it is. Dr. Sweet gave Holly an injection of radioactive arsenic, which has an affinity for tumors. An hour later she lay on a cot with her head between two scintillation counters to which scanning mechanisms were attached. Soon, as the counters picked up the gamma rays, the robot pens showed that the arsenic had concentrated in one part of the lower forebrain. This showed that Holly did indeed have a tumor. Another scan showed that it was left of center, and (within a third of an inch) how far. The machine, which Dr. Brownell had helped to work out under an AEC grant, told Dr. Sweet just where to operate. He removed an invading tumor. That was a year ago.

Last week Third-Grader Holly Hyde bounced into the hospital board room so that American Cancer Society officials could see for themselves that she now seems fully recovered. Her reading has improved, she has no more spells and feels, as she chirped, "fine."

Drs. Sweet and Brownell have run their tally of scanned subjects (including normal volunteers for comparison) to well over 200. The machine, they hope, will save many a patient from dangerous surgery inside the skull for the sole purpose of getting information and will make the operation far surer in cases where a lurking tumor is disclosed.

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