Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Shen, Francis X.
• Wolf, Susan M.
• Bhavnani, Supriya
• Deoni, Sean
• Elison, Jed T.
• Fair, Damien
• Garwood, Michael
• Gee, Michael S.
• Geethanath, Sairam
• Kay, Kendrick
• Lim, Kelvin O.
• Lockwood Estrin, Georgia
• Luciana, Monica
• Peloquin, David
• Rommelfanger, Karen
• Schiess, Nicoline
• Siddiqui, Khan
• Torres, Efraín
• Vaughan, J. Thomas

Titel

Emerging ethical issues raised by highly portable MRI research in remote and resource-limited international settings

Ist Teil von

• NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.), 2021-09, Vol.238, p.118210-118210, Article 118210

Ort / Verlag

Amsterdam: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Smaller, more affordable, and more portable MRI scanners offer opportunities to address unmet research needs and long-standing health inequities in remote and resource-limited international settings.•However, the use of portable MRI in field-based settings raises challenging ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that have not been adequately examined.•A guiding principle for field-based MRI research must be ensuring that local communities are ongoing partners in the co-creation of knowledge.•Field-based MRI research in remote, low-resource settings should produce local value to justify the risks of the research and minimize the possibility of abuse.•More opportunities for genuine bi-directional learning are needed to address these issues, and development of consensus guidance should prioritize participation of stakeholders from resource-limited communities. Smaller, more affordable, and more portable MRI brain scanners offer exciting opportunities to address unmet research needs and long-standing health inequities in remote and resource-limited international settings. Field-based neuroimaging research in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) can improve local capacity to conduct both structural and functional neuroscience studies, expand knowledge of brain injury and neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders, and ultimately improve the timeliness and quality of clinical diagnosis and treatment around the globe. Facilitating MRI research in remote settings can also diversify reference databases in neuroscience, improve understanding of brain development and degeneration across the lifespan in diverse populations, and help to create reliable measurements of infant and child development. These deeper understandings can lead to new strategies for collaborating with communities to mitigate and hopefully overcome challenges that negatively impact brain development and quality of life. Despite the potential importance of research using highly portable MRI in remote and resource-limited settings, there is little analysis of the attendant ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI). To begin addressing this gap, this paper presents findings from the first phase of an envisioned multi-staged and iterative approach for creating ethical and legal guidance in a complex global landscape. Section 1 provides a brief introduction to the emerging technology for field-based MRI research. Section 2 presents our methodology for generating plausible use cases for MRI research in remote and resource-limited settings and identifying associated ELSI issues. Section 3 analyzes core ELSI issues in designing and conducting field-based MRI research in remote, resource-limited settings and offers recommendations. We argue that a guiding principle for field-based MRI research in these contexts should be including local communities and research participants throughout the research process in order to create sustained local value. Section 4 presents a recommended path for the next phase of work that could further adapt these use cases, address ethical and legal issues, and co-develop guidance in partnership with local communities.