IBM Creates MRI With 100M Times the Resolution

An anonymous reader writes "IBM Research scientists, in collaboration with the Center for Probing the Nanoscale at Stanford University, have demonstrated magnetic resonance imaging with volume resolution 100 million times finer than conventional MRI. This result, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, signals a significant step forward in tools for molecular biology and nanotechnology by offering the ability to study complex 3D structures at the nanoscale."

Comments

Interesting!

[girlintraining]

I wonder if it can resolve individual dendrite connections in the brain. If so, we've just developed our first brain scanner capable of mapping a living brain's circuitry. Which means, in principle, we now possess all the technology required to model a human brain, or for that matter (but at extreme cost), create a synthetic one. Though, at present, we have no way of truly providing it with the interface necessary for communication or interaction with the physical world.

Re:Interesting!

[zalas]

You need temporal resolution on the order of one second or less in addition to spatial resolution for most brain imaging. Standard MRI scans essentially scan frequency space of the specimen, which takes some time. The article doesn't say what time resolution their new technique has.

Re:Not really.

[geckipede]

So you need a way for the external machine to influence parts of your brain. If you can make a computer override the output of any particular neuron then you can burn out and take over the running of one neuron at a time. It's the ship of theseus problem made to work for you. Your identity is not embedded in any particular cell, so you could remain conscious though the duration of the transfer process. I imagine it taking quite a long time, I wouldn't be comfortable with it unless the transfer took a good fraction of a year, but the principle is sound even if you do it more quickly.

20 years ago when I was at Stanford.

[John Sokol]

20 years ago when I was at Stanford they were experimenting with MRI Microscopy.
They were able to image 1/10 mm resolution of the inside of a common snail. Just using miniature coils.

My group was using the same machine to map blood flow volume and direction using MRI.

The article doesn't explain what they are doing in much detail. Even the little video is vague.

This advancement was enabled by a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM), which relies on detecting ultrasmall magnetic forces.