During the month of November the research and development team made a field trip to a local medical CT scanning service, taking with them two recent neuro patients. Due to circumstances surrounding their death, one patient was cryoprotected and the other was not.
Patient safety is Alcor’s main objective, and with that in mind our neuro patients were transported inside individual liquid nitrogen dewars securely tied down and well padded against vibration in the back of our Rescue Vehicle.
Having safely returned from our trip and taking care of returning the patients to the patient care bay, Steve Graber opened up the first of the patient scan files in our 3-D visualization software.
A direct comparison of two brains digitally enhanced in software (Fig. 2) highlights unusual density variations between brains. When one compares these identically composed, sectioned and displayed images of a cryoprotected brain (top image) vs non-cryoprotected brain it is clear that there is a big difference in overall density between these two brains. A-1546 displays a significantly greater electron density than A-1088 throughout the majority of the brain.
A future test of a variety of substances under the CT scanner in LN2 is expected to help to identify electron density specifics of cryoprotectants, which in turn will make our analysis that much more complete. We also expect to test a locally pronounced patient vs an out of state pronounced patient to determine the quality differences in cryoprotection caused by the time-lag to cryoprotection between these two scenarios.