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MRI Scans of a person's brain
- VeilEm 11y agoIf we get better at this and are able to create detailed enough scans of a brain maybe we can recreate that person some day, including memories and everything.
- kendallpark 11y agoI highly doubt this will ever be possible, from both a biological and a computer science standpoint.
- abecedarius 11y agohttp://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/brain-emulation-roadmap-report1.pdf http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/brain-emulation-r...
- daveguy 11y agoAs kendallpark pointed out this is highly unlikely. I upvoted you because it's an interesting "hmmm... what would it take?" The spatial resolution of an fMRI is high compared to something like EEG, but the time resolution is much slower. Even the spatial resolution is on the order of cubic mm at the absolute best. So, we are no where close to being able to scan the activity of every one of the ~100 billion neurons in a human brain and it would 7+ orders of magnitude better spatial recognition and associated processing capabilities. So, the magnitude of your "if" is large enough that it's on the level of Kurzweil Crazy, but cool to think about regardless.
- notgood 11y agoI know nothing about neurology, but my money would be on using a different mechanism to extract all the data, maybe something like fake neurons that dump all the information via WiFi, a MITM attack for the brain itself if you like.
- HappyTypist 11y agoWith our current understanding, such tasks are comparable to trying to break the speed of light. However, we could probably get incredibly close without any internal data extraction. Our personalities, while highly complex, can be approximated into some simple traits (e.g. 74% 'passive-aggressive', 47% empathy) and replication of our knowledge isn't strictly necessary. Find 10,000 interests and create a int_8 each of how much someone is into it. Et cetra.
- dcunit3d 11y agoI don't think we need to scan 100% of the brain in molecular detail in order to read & preserve the information. It should be possible to observe the circuitry at a higher level and recreate an approximation -- though it'd be just that, an approximation. Additionally, much of the information could be compressed to a much more lightweight format than digitizing the physical neural networks of the brain. Digitizing a static physical model of the brain is problematic in itself. Many regions and structures in the brain are likely structurally dynamic. That is, the neural circuitry could change structure from day to day and this is definitely true over longer timescales. So it'd be much easier to read the data from the brain into another format rather than emulate the physical structure of the hardware. I've thought a bit about information could be read from MRI scans such as these. In the absence of higher resolution data, I don't think there could any memories retrieved. I don't know the low-level details of how MRI data is encoded, but I do know it is recorded in slices. To retrieve memories, you'd need to read 3D regions from the brain. And it'd need to be much more high-resolution.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- devereaux 11y agoWith a usual CT scan, you can do a volume rendering. Play around with the opacity to show the skin - this will give you a 3D image of your face. Example on http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LuLV6F-Fp0o/TbcY7BUvpjI/AAAAAAAAAMo/4AEDNzhHqko/s320/Martin%2BFace5.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LuLV6F-Fp0o/TbcY7BUvpjI/AAAAAAAAAM... With a usual MRI, unfortunately slices are too far apart to be able to stitch them together like this.
- rplittle 11y agoI have files from a CT scan, perhaps I'll look into this.
- wl 11y agoAll the MRI scans of my brain I've gotten ("structural" scans taken as part of fMRI studies) have been sufficient to get a pretty decent volume rendering of my head. Some of them cut off about half way through the jaw, but that's another issue entirely.
- lostlogin 11y agoThe research scans use 3D T1 (and sometimes T2) scans for mapping the functional data onto a brain region. They have to put the low res functional scans onto something that has some degree of resolution. Functional scans are acquired with temporal resolution in mind - the change in signal after activation is something like 6 seconds, and to accurately sample this you want a whole brain acquisition in much less time that that. We typically acquire whole brain scans in something like 3 seconds. New techniques such as multiband imaging are acquiring whole brain scans in 600-700ms or so. This is pretty fast. Clinical scans do use 3D techniques but tend to go for 2D scans (which are a slice, then a gap of 10-30% usually of slice thickness) then a slice. 2D scans are faster, have much better in plane resolution (lower through plane as slices are fatter and have gaps between them). Clinical scans are also one hell of a lot better for identifying things as numerous image weighting a are obtained. MR tech here.
- devereaux 11y ago
- meshko 11y agoDoes he accept pull requests?
- aculver 11y agoHey David, I didn't expect to see your brain on the front page of HN. Can you confirm for us that everything is OK? :-)
- dcunit3d 11y agohey! yeh, everything's going well. the scans were done to help diagnose some things about 2 years ago. nothing turned up in the scans though. thanks for tweeting me earlier. i had no idea this was on Hacker News! lol
- kendallpark 11y agoThis couldn't come at a more opportune time. I'm studying neuro this block and need me some brains to look at.
- sergers 11y agoi posted this link earliar, but check out https://www.mypacs.net/mpv4/hss/casemanager https://www.mypacs.net/mpv4/hss/casemanager includes case analysis on the images
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- piceas 11y agoI have a set of slices which weren’t so healthy. Let me know if sharing them would be of value to you. https://d0921abcf0d58ba49c3d-6ecbc7565855acc8ab3c742259f09feb.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/slice.jpg https://d0921abcf0d58ba49c3d-6ecbc7565855acc8ab3c742259f09fe...
- simonster 11y agoHere's the "Colin 27" brain atlas, derived from 27 scans of Colin J. Holmes's brain: http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesAtlases/Colin27 http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesAtlases/Colin27 Here's a lot of data from Russ Poldrack, who scanned his brain and collected behavioral and metabolic data from himself very regularly over the course of a year: http://myconnectome.org/wp/data-sharing/ http://myconnectome.org/wp/data-sharing/
- zump 11y agoNow to apply compressive sensing!
- rdtsc 11y agoWas wondering, in the general, is the patient always the copyright owner of this kind of data? Can they relicense it, publish it, do anything they want with it? It seems like that would be the case, but there has been talk about patenting parts of the DNA in the past, and legally sometimes things work in un-expected ways.
- kendallpark 11y agoYes. Patients own their data. HIPAA. EDIT actually, it looks like I'm wrong in more states than I am right: http://www.healthinfolaw.org/comparative-analysis/who-owns-medical-records-50-state-comparison http://www.healthinfolaw.org/comparative-analysis/who-owns-m... However, there are very strict rules on how that data can be used and shared.
- pak 11y agoWhoa, hold on there. HIPAA generally gives patients the right to access their medical records [1], but I don't think it says anything about whether they "own" it in the sense that they get to edit the data to their liking (I don't believe they do, in the US), and it certainly doesn't say anything about copyright. Most of the HN crowd (and myself) would probably say that the ideal situation is for patients to own copyright and other rights in medical data generated about them, but I don't think this issue has actually been settled, either in a cultural or a legal sense [2]. [1]: http://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/access/index.html http://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/... [2]: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/837393 http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/837393
- kendallpark 11y agoI would argue that patients owning the copyright on their health data is actually a bad thing. It would make a lot of research much more difficult if they had to get rights to publish patient data even after de-indentification. We NEED that data to drive the field of medicine forward and as long as the patient's privacy is not compromised, it would make sense for the hospitals to own the data.
- trickyager 11y agoJust as a general note, these images contain personally identifying information about the patient. This includes not just the patient's name, but also his age, address, phone number, and an extremely limited health history.
- tedivm 11y agoAre you sure? I see his doctor's phone number and address but that's it.
- trickyager 11y agoMost definitely. Using the pydicom library, you can view all of the metadata stored along with the images. For instance, the patient's telephone number is listed with a 540 area code.
- dewarrn1 11y agoI have not and will not peek at the DICOM, but anyone else thinking about doing something like this should heed the preceding comments and be aware that stripping PHI headers is critical to deidentifying medical imaging data. Also, the imaging data itself can also be identifying — best practice for sharing deidentified neuroimaging data involves face-stripping.
- barrkel 11y agoAbout 20% of the file is metadata, from a brief scan of it.
- fencepost 11y agoI'm pretty sure that he's legally allowed to release his own PHI and PII. Since the README includes "I open sourced my brain. Here it is," it's from "dcunited001" and the scans are for David Conner, I'm pretty sure this is the person in question releasing his own information.
- kendallpark 11y ago
- martin1b 11y agoAnyone recommend a viewer?
- McKayDavis 11y agoOsiriX [1] is a popular OS X/iOS viewer. 3DSlicer [2] is an excellent alternative that runs on Win/OS X/Linux [1] http://www.osirix-viewer.com http://www.osirix-viewer.com [2] http://www.slicer.org http://www.slicer.org
- anon4711 11y agoOn OS X, Horos is a free and open derivative of OsiriX. http://www.horosproject.org http://www.horosproject.org
- lukeadams 11y agoDWV [1] (open source, Flash/Java-less webapp) Seems to still be a WIP, but it lets you load the files from the repo (to localstorage), despite throwing errors left and right. ;) [1] https://ivmartel.github.io/dwv/demo/stable/viewers/mobile/ https://ivmartel.github.io/dwv/demo/stable/viewers/mobile/
- ivmartel 11y agoHi, I'm the author of DWV. You're right still WIP and happy to help solve errors! Pull requests are welcome!
- alister 11y agoFor Windows users, I suggest IrfanView: http://www.irfanview.com/ http://www.irfanview.com/ It's freeware (though not open source) and an excellent and fast image viewer. You'll have to also download the plugins to view the Dicom images (the MRI images). Fortunately all plugins for IrfanView can be downloaded as a single file as explained at the site above. As other have already mentioned, the MRI images are full of personal meta data (which can be shown by clicking "info" in IrfanView). I assume that the OP must have been aware of this.
- 11y ago
- sergers 11y agoif you are interested in viewing patient scans, with the PHI anonymized but the rest of the metadata in tact, check out: https://www.mypacs.net/mpv4/hss/casemanager https://www.mypacs.net/mpv4/hss/casemanager (30,380 cases. 187,945 images.) its a teaching/sharing site for radiologists where they can send the data from their PACS. this is the free public site which includes a basic web based dicom viewer to zoom/pan/window level etc
- quasarj 11y agoOr The Cancer Imaging Archive: http://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/ http://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/ Though I'm not sure how much of it can be accessed without an account.
- aantix 11y agoBack in December of 2007 a nodule was detected on my lung. Not knowing what to think of it, I posted the images on my blog and recruited other med students to comment on the images. Here's the Way Back Machine link to the blog post. https://web.archive.org/web/20081205032710/http://www.runfatboy.net/blog/2007/12/28/diagnose-me/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081205032710/http://www.runfat...
- rangibaby 11y agoSo... what was it?
- aantix 11y agoEnded up being benign. I probably went a bit overboard, but did a pet scan, nothing lit up. Continued to do CT scans to monitor for growth, and it stayed the same. I was just so scared..
- ZoF 11y agoWhat was the outcome of this?
- chestervonwinch 11y agoNot to comment on your situation specifically, just some interesting related information: The national lung screening trial [1] which had on the order of ~25k CT scan patients and ~25k radiograph patients found 96.4% and 94.5% of the positive screenings to be false positives. This screening trial has been a large motivator for computer-aided detection, diagnosis, and characterization of lung CT scans (although work on this goes back to the 80s and 90s). If you look at the fleischner guidelines [2], the key factors in determining follow up are patient background and nodule size and growth rate. There are secondary diagnostic characteristics that are correlated with malignancy as well, e.g. spiculation and texture patterns. [1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4356534/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4356534/ [2]: http://radiopaedia.org/articles/fleischner-society-pulmonary-nodule-recommendations http://radiopaedia.org/articles/fleischner-society-pulmonary...
- schappim 11y agoI've submitted a pull request: https://github.com/dcunited001/mri-scans/pulls https://github.com/dcunited001/mri-scans/pulls
- platz 11y agoyou're funny
- th0ma5 11y agoCan I just get an MRI or CT scan without a medical reason and at a reasonable cost? Perhaps that is an absurd question in the United States.
- neonkiwi 11y agoFind a study and sign up. Look for research groups in your local institutions and send an email to a couple grad students asking about studies they or their colleagues are running in the near future. A researcher may give you the scan if you ask nicely and say it's for personal interest, plus you'll be compensated for your time /and/ simultaneously help with the advancement science :)
- denizozger 11y agoYou can: https://klarismo.com/ https://klarismo.com/ (YC S15)
- schlunzi 11y agoTo expand on Deniz' answer, Klarismo (YC S15) does a full body MRI, including a high resolution scan of your head for $249, available in SF and LA at the moment. We extract your brain, segment out gray and white matter and measure your brain volume. In addition we segment, measure and visualize visceral fat, subcutaneous fat and major muscle groups.
- Razengan 11y agoNot quiet the same, of course, but this reminds me of the game Soma, where [SPOILERS!] the protagonist has his brain fully mapped and "uploaded" as part of a treatment, and his scans are used as a template for A.I. research in the future, leading him to be "reborn" a century later in a different body.
- anotheryou 11y agoAnything cool one can do with this? I have my MRI + DTI and wonder what to do with it. Mine looks like any brain to me (no tumors, yay!). From the DTI I was able to calculate the white matter trajectory with slicer: http://screencast.com/t/yDYFJdL7D http://screencast.com/t/yDYFJdL7D (I was a little let down I couldn't follow the visual nerves, but as they cross there is no clear direction of diffusion that could be imaged I guess...)
- marmaduke 11y agoYou could virtualize and simulate your brain, see my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962075
- kenferry 11y agoYes. For my girlfriend's birthday I grabbed her MRI scans, extracted the pial surface as a mesh, 3D printed the mesh, made a silicone mold from the print, and cast her brain in chocolate so she could eat her own brain, thus becoming an auto-zombie.
- hellofunk 11y agoI did this too, but it took much longer than the simple steps you've outlined would seemingly take. I spent at least an hour on the whole process, which is more than I'd prefer for something so straightforward. I blame the early tech of 3d printing for not being as swift as I'd hoped.
- akerro 11y agoI'm starting to be afraid that one day my brain, memories will be pushed on git :<
- ciroduran 11y agoThe McGill university also offers these MRI simulations, if you need brain scans for your visualisation/processing needs. http://brainweb.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/brainweb/ http://brainweb.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/brainweb/ Very useful when I did my undergraduate thesis.
- rogeryu 11y agoLast year an MRI scan was made of my brain. This was part of a promotion research at the university. All I got back was a lousy screenshot of my brain. ;-) No but seriously - it was a big shock to see my brain in a picture. It is a really weird experience, similar when I saw myself for the first time on film. Maybe this is a normal experience for the current generation, but I hadn't seen myself on film before age 15. You have an image how you move, what you look like, but then you see this on film, and it's a total shocker. All these small movements you make, typical for you, and everybody around you knows them, except for you. So everybody else sees nothing strange when viewing that movie, except you. I've seen many MRI scans in films and tv series, although I can't remember one since then. From these I have a general picture of what a brain looks like. I've seen plastic 3D brain models. And then I see my brain and it's so different. It's clearly me, no doubt, but still... Totally weird!!!
- christiangenco 11y agoHow do you feel like a low resolution 3D scan of what someone told you was the inside of your head is clearly you? I'd feel like they could've shown me anyone's MRI and I'd have no way of telling them apart.
- rogeryu 11y agoI got one screenshot with three images in it. The (vertical) profile image is clearly me. The other two (vertical frontal and horizontal at eye level) that could be anyone.
- christiangenco 11y agoAhh, that's super neat. I didn't realize MRIs included vertical profiles!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- amelius 11y agoThis is nice. It would be even nicer if this was complemented by medical records, and genotyping data (e.g. from 23andme).
- cafebeen 11y agoFor those who are interested, the human connectome project is in the process of acquiring and publicly releasing a database of 1000+ MRIs collected from normal subjects: http://www.humanconnectome.org/data/ http://www.humanconnectome.org/data/
- jpellman 11y agoNKI-Rockland has a number of participants with "No Diagnosis or Condition on Axis I" as well: http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/enhanced/demo.html http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/enhanced/demo.html
- jpellman 11y agoFor those who are interested, this Nature table summarizes the MRI datasets that are out there: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n11/fig_tab/nn.3818_T1.html http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n11/fig_tab/nn.3818_...
- boas 11y agoHere's a normal brain MRI, compared to photographed slices of a brain: https://www.claripacs.com/a.php?a=vw https://www.claripacs.com/a.php?a=vw (Click and drag to scroll. "Share > Download" to download the full DICOM data) This site has thousands of anonymized MRI and CT images of normal and abnormal scans, with clinical history in many cases. For example, here are annotated scans of normal anatomy: https://www.claripacs.com/folder/Anatomy&view_type=-1 https://www.claripacs.com/folder/Anatomy&view_type=-1 One challenge with writing web DICOM viewers is the lack of full 16 bit image support in browsers. This requires writing custom code to properly handle window / level on 16-bit medical images. Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Claripacs.
- dmd 11y agoWow. This goes to show that people in field X often have no idea what's interesting to people outside their own field. My PhD is in cognitive neuroscience, and so I have many dozens of MRIs of myself done for test or calibration purposes, done using all sorts of different machines, sequences, etc. It's never occurred to me that these images would be of interest to anyone but me. I suspect this is true for pretty much anyone in any field.
- smtpserver 11y agoI 3D printed mine (skull is from another project) http://i.imgur.com/BelYUSih.jpg http://i.imgur.com/BelYUSih.jpg and a Blender render: http://i.imgur.com/oPCSxbo.png http://i.imgur.com/oPCSxbo.png
- tdaltonc 11y agoBeautiful! What did you use to turn the DICOM/NIFTI files in to a printable format?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]