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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.
http://www.suddenlysenior.com/Images/malebrainwome n.gif
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
All MRI machines can do it all; they are just different programs you feed the machines to get different images. Unfortunately, the images at the end still have to be lined up. This is typically done by allowing the brains to rotate in 3 dimensions until the registration maximizes some function; for example, the mutual information between the two images. See the package fsl (http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/) for some great fMRI analysis tools, including FLIRT for aligning brains (of multiple patients, or one patient's fMRI scan to MRI scan).
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.
My "noodle" is nowhere near my brain...
Fortunately, most brains (unlike arms and legs) aren't in the habit of moving around a lot during an MRI scan, so they're relatively easy to match up!
You've obviously never spent an hour inside one of those machines. I used to do research in an fMRI lab and even something like post nasal drip eventually makes you swallow just to keep breathing and the slight movement pushes your head into a new pixel lattice so when you subtract the images you just see gray everywhere.
"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.
> While it is good to see more talented people working in the medical visualization space,
> this is not really a new thing. Image Fusion [wikipedia.org] has been around for a while now
> but it has not yet become a mainstream technique.
It is very mainstream for PET/CT fusion. Many manufacturers make combo PET/CT machines for just this purpose since the acquisitions are done at the same time, they align very closely and little if any rotation/translation has to be done for a good volume match.