Welcome to the PREMRI study homepage!

Dear Families,

We would like to thank you for considering or agreeing to participate in the Premature Infant MRI Study.

The focus of this study is to examine the relationship between premature birth, brain injury, and neurologic development.

Currently we do not have a way to predict developmental outcomes in babies that suffer brain injury as a result of prematurity, and one of our primary goals is to see if we can identify a relationship between the findings on a baby’s MRI scan and his or her long term neurological and developmental outcome. If we have a better way of understanding the injury and predicting outcome, we can do a better job planning treatment for babies and determining who would be good candidates for early therapies.

The developmental outcome is very important to our determining the value of the MRI. As a result of this, it is very important that we continue to see your child for all of his or her scheduled follow-up visits. We work with the Intensive Care Nursery Follow-up Clinic to ensure that appointments get scheduled and that you have a way to contact us if and when you have any questions. Our standard follow-up points are six months, one year, eighteen months, two-and-a-half years, and four years. At each of the follow-up exams after six months we do a neurology exam and developmental assessment. The six-month exam is just to check in with you and your baby to make sure that everything is going well.

We want this webpage to be valuable to you, so please let us know if you have any comments or questions about the structure of the site. Also, there is a section on the findings of the study that we hope will be of interest to you.

Once again, thank you for your participation, and we look forward to hearing from you!

A. James Barkovich, M.D.
Principal Investigator