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A 3-D View of the Brain
Jamie found a nifty story about Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital coming up with new 3D Brain Imaging Software. The interesting bit is that it merges data from MRIs as well as various other types of brain scans to create a single visualization for your noodle.
As well as TFA there's a 'Multimedia' link which give much more info - as well as having some pretty pictures.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
There's your referral. That will be $213,134.56, please.
FTFA:...including conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), and diffusion-tensor imaging (DTI).
They're all forms of MRI. Unless there's a MRI machine that can do it all, it would seem to me that you would have to have the patient go from one machine to another. I'm curious how they match up the structures exactly from one scan to another. Do they use a bunch of points on differing brain structures and then the software matches those up?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
http://www.suddenlysenior.com/Images/malebrainwome n.gif
Would order pictures of his brain and keep one on his desk in a frame.
:-D
I'm such a dork, because I kinda want one too.
If it really was a 3D representation of my brain, all you'd see would be tits and code (and maybe some beer).
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
http://www.technologyreview.com/player/07/08/06Sau ser/1.aspx
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
Computer-assisted stereotactic neurosurgery has been around for a long time. The software takes MRI slices and uses a marching-cubes-type algorithm to convert from texels to voxels. I don't see how this software is anything new really, other than maybe using some other kind of input image.
I work within the field of medical imaging, and this is nothing new. People have been doing image fusion with images from different image modalities for over a decade. There are lots of products like this one, some even open source and with more impressive screenshots. Why is this particular product, which is not even named or referenced, featured? If you want to see impressive open source work within the medical world, check out ITK and VTK (http://www.vtk.org/ and http://www.itk.org/). Now that is really cutting edge work done with free software.
I think I lost all faith in /. peer moderation. I drop a Star Trek reference and get modded-down while some other guy talks about titties and beer and gets praised. *shakes head* [/whining]
The game.
While I'll grant that Dr. McCoy is important to the /. community, I'll submit that titties and beer are sacred.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
My "noodle" is nowhere near my brain...
great...now Dr. House will be ordering up a million of these on every episode.
We came,we saw, we kicked it's ass!
While it is good to see more talented people working in the medical visualization space, this is not really a new thing. Image Fusion has been around for a while now but it has not yet become a mainstream technique.
Who says the human brain came about by accident? Evolutionary theory certainly does not say this.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
The doctors created a full 3-D image of my head using multiple imaging technologies and found nothing.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
"That is why I am excited about something that should have been here 10 years ago."
It was. I actually wrote my master thesis about it exactly 10 years ago. But one thing is the technology. Another thing is someone to fund the development of a fully functional package. Technology is many years ahead of reality when it comes to medical imaging.
... and this is your brain on Dual 768MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards.
Yea, but TFA said 3D image of The Brain.
You're half right. Evolutionary theory states that the best random mutations survive. Due to their superiority, the survival of organisms with beneficial mutations(and therefore, their ability to pass on their genes) is not random, however, the existence of their desirable traits is purely random.
In other words, the brain in its entirety, as a compilation of traits, would not be random, but each and every individual function would be. I believe that the point that the parent poster was trying to make was the improbability of a collection of random beneficial mutations, each one highly unlikely to emerge in the first place, forming an organ as complex as the brain, which, due to its extreme complexity, is still not fully understood, nor can it be replicated.
this is not new! we have been doing this in the CILab for years at rutgers http://biomedical.rutgers.edu/faculty.php?id=23
SGI Volumizer did this like 10 years ago...
http://www.sgi.com/products/software/volumizer/
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I do understand what the parent poster was saying, and it points out the great misconception of those who see "intelligent design" in greatly complex organisms. I believe this great complexity is a sign that we are NOT intelligently designed. Take, for instance, the human immune system, or in particular the inflammatory system. There are many different systems functioning, many at cross purposes. And the effect of inflammation is rarely beneficial to the organism. I would hope that an "intelligent" designer would have done a much better job. The "design" could certainly be much simpler and work at least as well. No, the great complexity of living organisms is a sign that that they have indeed evolved by "accident".
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
I hope this becomes the norm. er - giving out the data, not my wife needing an MRI.
I think I heard that this software project originated in Redmond, but it failed in the QA process when they were unable to find a brain to test it on. (...it's a joke)
"Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f-ing Peace Corps." - John 'Bluto' Blutarsky
Imagine a beowulf cluster of brain-imaging systems...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Huh? Inflammation raises the temperature of a specific part of the body to kill, or at least inhibit the growth of, the infecting pathogen. It's not good for the organism, but its not good for the causative agent, either.
I can't say I understand what you mean when you say that a system as complex as the immune system (what with all the differentiated cells, specific antibodies, cytokines directing cells, the compliment system, the antigen recognition and memorization of the adaptive immune response, ect., all preformed with no outside direction by nonthinking cells that are highly complex machines on their own) is indicative of randomness. Personally, I always thought that such a finely tuned molecular clockwork was evidence to the contrary.
is done through the application of 'level sets' its pretty fun stuff to study. There are some cool videos of level set stuff like this one: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/animations/wa ter_oil.avi . And the application of level sets is very broad.
I've only dabbled in Level Sets but I am very tempted to do a Master's thesis on it =P.