When you are pregnant, especially the very first time, what is happening inside, behind your belly button, almost doesn't feel real until you go for your first scan and actually get to see with your own eyes that there really is a baby in there.
And there is nothing like that feeling of seeing your baby for the first time – trust me. It is all sorts of amazing – and will in an instant make up for all those weeks of feeling yucky and tired and under the weather.
But while expectant parents up until now have had to be content with the rather grainy, sometimes hard-to-make-out-what-is-what ultrasound image (unless you private pay for the slightly more detailed 3D scan), soon parents-to-be could be able to watch their unborn bundles in a lot more detail thanks to a revolutionary new MRI scan.
Would you like to see you baby stretching, wiggling and even tugging on the umbilical cord – well, now soon you can, all thanks to this new invention by a London-based team of medics.
The incredible detail reveals just how fully formed a foetus is at 20 weeks and has also now in the UK reignited the debate on lowering the current 24-week legal abortion limit in place.
In this short video, created by the iFIND project, you can see the scan of a 20-week-old baby – and learn exactly what they get up to while in utero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfE-0GrM520
To get a scan so to be so detailed, the researchers used algorithms, magnetic fields and radio waves, creating extra-high quality moving footage.
This is what Dr David Lloyd, a Clinical Research Fellow at King's College London and part of the project had to say to
MailOnline about the new invention:
"Taking pictures of a 20-week fetus while they're still in the womb really isn't that easy," Lloyd explains. "For one thing, they're very small. The fetal heart, for example, with all of its tiny chambers and valves, is only about 15mm long: less than the size of penny."
The iFIND project hopes its technology will eventually improve antenatal scans for all mothers-to-be and be rolled out globally.
