New Discovery on Diagnosing Brain Damage
B. OBAMA: I think there are mechanisms in place to make sure that institutions that are taking taxpayer money are not using that money for excessive executive compensation. And I think that, when you see the announcement that we make, people will say this is a reasonable approach.</s>CHETRY: Welcome back to the Most News in the Morning. Time to fast forward now to the stories you'll be seeing later today on CNN. You just heard President Obama there talking about his plan to cap executive compensation for companies who accept massive amounts of bailout dollars from our taxes. He'll unveil it at 11:00 Eastern this morning. His plan would limit yearly pay to $500,000 for executives whose companies take future bailouts. Live coverage of that announcement on CNN and cnn.com. Also this afternoon, Michelle Obama takes her Listening Tour to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The First Lady will visit with HUD staffers, speak to them briefly. Mrs. Obama is visiting all government agencies. Also a double dose of winter in North Carolina. As much as six inches of snow expected in the mountain there. A second storm is expected to dump more than a foot of snow near the Tennessee border. Very cold all across the south, John.</s>ROBERTS: Yes. There's lots of snow and we had a whole day of it here yesterday, though not much stuck on the ground in New York City. A team of doctors discovering the trick to diagnosing brain damage maybe in our eyes. They have developed a special device called an eye tracker which could be the quick diagnosis for soldiers injured on the battlefield. Our Deborah Feyerick has today's look at the "Edge of Discovery."</s>DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This device tracks eye movements. In a matter of seconds it can detect brain damage caused by anything from traffic accidents and sports injuries to bomb blasts. The eye tracker didn't exist when Sergeant Major Mike Welsh was injured in a car bomb explosion in Afghanistan.</s>SGT. MAJOR MIKE WELSH, BRAIN INJURY VICTIM: They removed fragments out of my temple.</s>FEYERICK: Two years after the blast, Welsh still has trouble balancing his checkbook and has constant headaches.</s>WELSH: You could say that having a traumatic brain injury is almost like sometimes you're dead and you don't remember that you're dead.</s>FEYERICK: It took a month just to diagnose his brain damage, and Welsh says he's fortunate.</s>WELSH: There's guys that have gone a year or two without even being treated, because it wasn't diagnosed immediately.</s>FEYERICK: The eye tracker is being developed by a team of researchers led by Dr. Jamshid Ghajar. Every thousandth of a second, a camera snaps a high-resolution image of the eye and special software looks for subtle eye jitters, a sign there's damage to the area of the brain that lets us focus and pay attention.</s>DR. JAMSHID GHAJAR, NEUROSURGEON, WEILL CORNELL: That jitter is responsible for a lot of attention problems and memory problems. And this eye tracker picks that up very quickly.</s>FEYERICK: So treatment can start right away. Welsh looks forward to the day the device will be portable enough to take to the front lines.</s>WELSH: The sooner that can be done, the sooner they can enter treatment.</s>FEYERICK: Deborah Feyerick, CNN.</s>CHETRY: The president's media blitz.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He wants to make sure that he has hit the entire universe of potential listeners and viewers.</s>CHETRY (voice-over): But how much access is excess?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is a danger for presidents speaking too much and too off-the-cuff.</s>CHETRY: Will overexposure undercut the president's message? You're watching the Most News in the Morning.