This is not your average baby video. For one thing, the star isn't even fully born at the end. And, doctors say, this video is the first to use a magnetic resonance imaging machine (MRI) to show birth as it happens, from the inside.
The images were shot during a normal birth at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany, in November, 2010, researchers say in a report published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Still MRI pictures of the birth were previously published, but this is the first look at the video, made with time-lapsed images over the last 45 minutes of labor.
The MRI was safe for the baby (a boy) and the mother (a 24-year-old women with two younger children), the report says. There was just one concern: the thumping noise familiar to anyone who has had an MRI scan. That's why the video stops just as the baby's head emerges: Doctors turned off the machine because they didn't want to risk exposing his ears to the sound.
The doctors write that their experiment "opened a new way to study the mechanism of birth. " Researcher Christian Bamberg told Reuters in 2010: "The main reasons for the research are to answer the question of why a birth may stall and to visually capture the birthing process and any complications... The images are spectacular. They show which movements the fetus makes in the birth canal, how its bones move and how its head changes shape during birth."
The doctors don't say how they convinced a woman to go through the final stages of labor in an MRI machine -- but do say she weathered the experience just fine.
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