5 ms·

I had my head examined...

165 points by abstractbill 17y ago

icey 17y ago
That's pretty cool. Did you go to a private company to get your MRI done or was this something that was covered under your insurance and they just happened to let you keep the data?
- tocomment 17y ago
  I'm curious too how you got the data? Did you give you slices like that, and you scanned them?
  - wesley 17y ago
    Different guy here, also had an mri done. I simply got a cd-rom with the image slices and a software to view them. There's about 600 images if I can recall correctly.
    - icey 17y ago
      Via insurance or private company? I would really like to do this, but I have no medical reason to do it. I'm just curious about what my insides look like. If anyone knows of a place that will let random joes get an MRI in exchange for money, I'd be interested in hearing about it - as well as how much it costs.
      - Banzai10 17y ago
        You can say that you are feeling very bad headaches, I think it's a good reason and it would be in benefit of science and curiosity
        icey 17y ago
        And people wonder why health insurance premiums are so bad ;)
      - teej 17y ago
        All you need is a doctor's referral to get an MRI. Go to your doctor and ask nicely, that should be enough. Once you have that, you can shop around to any hospital or clinic that has the right equipment. MRIs can start off at $1,000, so I hope you really want it!
      - sachinag 17y ago
        Please be aware that MRIs have an utterly massive amount of radiation. X-rays are almost always done first because of the risk of damage from the radiation. You really don't want to have an elective MRI. (That said, I'm aware of no known studies that have demonstrated long-term risk from MRI radiation, but to me, prudence says you don't subject yourself to an MRI that you don't have to.)
        timr 17y ago
        1) It's radio energy, not the ionizing radiation that we associate mutations and cancer. 2) It's actually very low power. Most of the energy in an MRI machine goes toward maintaining a super-high magnetic field. The radio energy used is on the order of a few watts per kg body weight. 3) The danger isn't being irradiated. The danger is being cooked.
        sokoloff 17y ago
        One of the main reasons to do the X-ray first is to ensure that you don't have any unknown ferrous metal (from welding, grinding, etc) that will become a projectile under the intense magnetic fields. (I wasn't aware that there was a massive amount of radiation from MRIs, and tend to doubt that claim. Are you confusing it with CT perhaps?)
        aarongough 17y ago
        The 'radiation' involved in an MRI is electro-magnetic radiation, otherwise known as radio waves. It's true that the field strengths involved are thousands of times stronger than what you encounter in everyday life but they are by no means harmful the way that ionizing particle radiation (X-rays, gammra rays, etc) is... The most likely side effect is peripheral nerve stimulation and even that highly unlikely because the field strengths are controlled to avoid it... In general MRIs are perfectly harmless and don't have any serious or lasting side-effects. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging for more info
        sachinag 17y ago
        See, I read that to make sure I wasn't crazy, and I just didn't see the distinction. I want to be clear: you're saying it's totally safe to get an MRI or a full body scan or whatever else as a totally elective procedure?
  - pmichaud 17y ago
    When you get a scan like this, they give you all the slices. When I had it done I got them physically, they might just do them digitally now. I even got a 3D model of my skull, it was pretty awesome.
  - chasingsparks 17y ago
    I get checkup MR scans every 6 months. I ask for copies for my images on CD. I have never had a place reject but some charge you an out of pocket 10-20$
- abstractbill 17y ago
  It was covered under my insurance (which means I'll pay an apparently random out-of-pocket amount between 0% and 99% at some later date, judging on previous uses of this insurance). They didn't offer me the data, but I asked, and they gave me a DVD full of scan data. Had to do a little research to figure out how to convert that data to jpeg images, but it wasn't too hard - it turns out imagemagick understands the formats involved, and can do all of the required processing steps.
  - wesley 17y ago
    Would you mind sharing the scripts? Would love to have something similar. :-)
    - abstractbill 17y ago
      I didn't save my work unfortunately ;-) I'll have a look when I get home tonight though - there's a decent chance everything is still in my bash history!
    - viraptor 17y ago
      It's was most probably in DICOM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Imaging_and_Communications_in_Medicine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Imaging_and_Communicati...) - pretty much a standard nowadays and you can find a lot of FOSS applications that can read it. Just watch out for the file sizes - those images are not compressed high-resolution 3d 16-or-more-bit grayscale, so you need massive amounts of ram/swap. The format itself is cool though - it can support annotations, arrows and basically anything-you-want overlayed on certain parts of the image afterwards.
- teej 17y ago
  I'm sure the intricacies vary by state and country, but you typically have a legal right to access your medical records, regardless of who pays and who performs the care. In the US, these rights are granted by HIPAA.
ErrantX 17y ago
Thanks for sharing that - the human body is crazily fascinating and the brain has to be one of the most intriguing parts of it. Seeing "inside" one's head is a little awe inspiring.
- JeremyChase 17y ago
  Yes, thank you for sharing. I had a lot of fun poking around your head. I hope that whatever was ailing you has subsided.
abstractbill 17y ago
This is my favorite image btw - my eyeballs look awesome! http://abstractnonsense.com/mri-images/top-to-bottom/0117.jpg http://abstractnonsense.com/mri-images/top-to-bottom/0117.jp...
- ErrantX 17y ago
  A whole new meaning to the phrase "you have beautiful eyes"
  - euccastro 17y ago
    Actually, I have once been complimented in a bar with the phrase "you have such big eyeballs!" It was mildly flattering since I could tell she meant it as a compliment, but I felt really weird.
- sylar 17y ago
  GREAT!!! now I can see how you dod that thing. Unfortunately I can't carry a RMI machine every time I need, so I'll keep killing people.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    I was about to downmod you, but then I noticed your username.
- bootload 17y ago
  "... This is my favorite image btw - my eyeballs look awesome! ..." The immediate thing that struck me is the lack of internal structure symmetry. The folding is different between the left and the right hemisphere.
- MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
  Get a print and put it in your wallet. Show it to people like it's your kids or something.
axod 17y ago
Awesome :) Really interesting to see it in an easy to use UI like that. All we need now is a zoom -> enhance, zoom -> enhance. Down to the neuron level.
anigbrowl 17y ago
Nice work! Fascinating to observe the differences between your left and right hemispheres. Are the barrel distortions constant or a function of the scanner's travel? eg move the Z/blue line all the way to the front or back of the head, and the sides pincushion inwards. I couldn't make out if it was constant or not, but the shape of the Y/Red frame seemed to change as it moves from top to bottom.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
yan 17y ago
Is it possible to participate in some students project and get your head scanned for free as part of a study? That would be sweet.
n8agrin 17y ago
If you haven't ever read about how MRIs work, you should. I first learned how MRIs work in college while studying biochemistry. The same technology is used in that field, but called NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance). It is the only medical technology that still blows me away when I sit down and think about it. The people who realized they could use it to take cross-sectional scans of peoples bodies without any invasive procedure are true geniuses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging
- arohner 17y ago
  "Just lay down on that table, and hold still while we orient the polarization of all the water in your head. It'll be just fine." CTs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_computed_tomography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_computed_tomography) and PETs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_Emission_Tomography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_Emission_Tomography) are pretty cool as well. CTs use essentially an X-ray beam that travels in a helical path around your body, and then use math to construct a 3D image, PET is the one where you drink an isotope, and they "catch" the positrons emitted from the radioactive material in your body.
- messel 17y ago
  Heh, I did an NMR experiment in senior lab back in school (1995 senior lab) and had forgotten that this is precisely how MRI works (the resonance should have given it away). I wish I had my old lab book (only had a paper copy) to review the experiment now, it's fogging out big time from my memory.
  - n8agrin 17y ago
    Not sure if it's true, but my prof in college told us that the reason the name was changed was because of the negative connotation of the word "nuclear". Otherwise it's exactly the same technology as NMR.
    - gcheong 17y ago
      I heard that as well from a couple profs of mine, doesn't mean it's true but it sounds reasonable.
robg 17y ago
A great intuitive way to link head mri's to actual heads. Thanks for this. I expect it will be really helpful for students. If anyone wants to get paid (usually about $30/hour) to have your head examined, search for a fMRI lab at the biggest universities in your area. You'll usually also get an image or two. If you ask nicely you may also be able to get the same type of set as here.
datums 17y ago
Nice work. How long till every one of our doctors has easy access to something like this ?
- niels_olson 17y ago
  Docs pretty much all have easy access to MRI, at least in the US. I have prescribed MRIs for patients in rural Louisiana. We just tell the patient "go get an MRI". Either the hospital radiology group has a scanner, or there are radiologists with MRI machines out in town. The patient just has to sign a HIPAA release so I can get the images and the radiologist's report. Fun fact: one of the failed attempts at regulating doctors was to for the government to buy machines for hospitals, thinking somehow the government would maybe somehow have some control over something, maybe who got scanned? Net effect was an explosion in high-end OR and radiology equipment.
RK 17y ago
There are a number of programs out there to look at images from MRI's, CT, etc, but if you are interested in hacking something together, the pydicom library is worth checking out. http://code.google.com/p/pydicom/ http://code.google.com/p/pydicom/
DEinspanjer 17y ago
Were you thinking about sexy women during the scan? If you focus the green axis of the scan just one click to the right from the center of your nose, your brain stem looks just like a dancer leaning against a wall.. Either that or a crucifix. Maybe you are catholic? :) Anyway, very interesting pictures. Thanks for sharing.
itodd 17y ago
Be sure to play with your study in OsiriX: http://www.osirix-viewer.com/ http://www.osirix-viewer.com/ It will build a 3d Model where you can peel back all the way to the bone.
andreas_s 17y ago
If you're in Boston (or somewhere close) and want to get your brain scanned as part of a study, look for announcements here: http://mollylab-1.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/bcs-subjects http://mollylab-1.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/bcs-subjects You'll get a CD with your images, and you'll get paid ($30 per hour, two hours on average).

165 points by abstractbill 17y ago

icey 17y ago

That's pretty cool. Did you go to a private company to get your MRI done or was this something that was covered under your insurance and they just happened to let you keep the data?

tocomment 17y ago
I'm curious too how you got the data? Did you give you slices like that, and you scanned them?
- wesley 17y ago
  Different guy here, also had an mri done. I simply got a cd-rom with the image slices and a software to view them. There's about 600 images if I can recall correctly.
  - icey 17y ago
    Via insurance or private company? I would really like to do this, but I have no medical reason to do it. I'm just curious about what my insides look like. If anyone knows of a place that will let random joes get an MRI in exchange for money, I'd be interested in hearing about it - as well as how much it costs.
    - Banzai10 17y ago
      You can say that you are feeling very bad headaches, I think it's a good reason and it would be in benefit of science and curiosity
      - icey 17y ago
        And people wonder why health insurance premiums are so bad ;)
    - teej 17y ago
      All you need is a doctor's referral to get an MRI. Go to your doctor and ask nicely, that should be enough. Once you have that, you can shop around to any hospital or clinic that has the right equipment. MRIs can start off at $1,000, so I hope you really want it!
    - sachinag 17y ago
      Please be aware that MRIs have an utterly massive amount of radiation. X-rays are almost always done first because of the risk of damage from the radiation. You really don't want to have an elective MRI. (That said, I'm aware of no known studies that have demonstrated long-term risk from MRI radiation, but to me, prudence says you don't subject yourself to an MRI that you don't have to.)
      - timr 17y ago
        1) It's radio energy, not the ionizing radiation that we associate mutations and cancer. 2) It's actually very low power. Most of the energy in an MRI machine goes toward maintaining a super-high magnetic field. The radio energy used is on the order of a few watts per kg body weight. 3) The danger isn't being irradiated. The danger is being cooked.
      - sokoloff 17y ago
        One of the main reasons to do the X-ray first is to ensure that you don't have any unknown ferrous metal (from welding, grinding, etc) that will become a projectile under the intense magnetic fields. (I wasn't aware that there was a massive amount of radiation from MRIs, and tend to doubt that claim. Are you confusing it with CT perhaps?)
      - aarongough 17y ago
        The 'radiation' involved in an MRI is electro-magnetic radiation, otherwise known as radio waves. It's true that the field strengths involved are thousands of times stronger than what you encounter in everyday life but they are by no means harmful the way that ionizing particle radiation (X-rays, gammra rays, etc) is... The most likely side effect is peripheral nerve stimulation and even that highly unlikely because the field strengths are controlled to avoid it... In general MRIs are perfectly harmless and don't have any serious or lasting side-effects. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging for more info
        sachinag 17y ago
        See, I read that to make sure I wasn't crazy, and I just didn't see the distinction. I want to be clear: you're saying it's totally safe to get an MRI or a full body scan or whatever else as a totally elective procedure?
- pmichaud 17y ago
  When you get a scan like this, they give you all the slices. When I had it done I got them physically, they might just do them digitally now. I even got a 3D model of my skull, it was pretty awesome.
- chasingsparks 17y ago
  I get checkup MR scans every 6 months. I ask for copies for my images on CD. I have never had a place reject but some charge you an out of pocket 10-20$
abstractbill 17y ago
It was covered under my insurance (which means I'll pay an apparently random out-of-pocket amount between 0% and 99% at some later date, judging on previous uses of this insurance). They didn't offer me the data, but I asked, and they gave me a DVD full of scan data. Had to do a little research to figure out how to convert that data to jpeg images, but it wasn't too hard - it turns out imagemagick understands the formats involved, and can do all of the required processing steps.
- wesley 17y ago
  Would you mind sharing the scripts? Would love to have something similar. :-)
  - abstractbill 17y ago
    I didn't save my work unfortunately ;-) I'll have a look when I get home tonight though - there's a decent chance everything is still in my bash history!
  - viraptor 17y ago
    It's was most probably in DICOM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Imaging_and_Communications_in_Medicine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Imaging_and_Communicati...) - pretty much a standard nowadays and you can find a lot of FOSS applications that can read it. Just watch out for the file sizes - those images are not compressed high-resolution 3d 16-or-more-bit grayscale, so you need massive amounts of ram/swap. The format itself is cool though - it can support annotations, arrows and basically anything-you-want overlayed on certain parts of the image afterwards.
teej 17y ago
I'm sure the intricacies vary by state and country, but you typically have a legal right to access your medical records, regardless of who pays and who performs the care. In the US, these rights are granted by HIPAA.

ErrantX 17y ago

Thanks for sharing that - the human body is crazily fascinating and the brain has to be one of the most intriguing parts of it. Seeing "inside" one's head is a little awe inspiring.

JeremyChase 17y ago
Yes, thank you for sharing. I had a lot of fun poking around your head. I hope that whatever was ailing you has subsided.

abstractbill 17y ago

This is my favorite image btw - my eyeballs look awesome! http://abstractnonsense.com/mri-images/top-to-bottom/0117.jpg http://abstractnonsense.com/mri-images/top-to-bottom/0117.jp...

ErrantX 17y ago
A whole new meaning to the phrase "you have beautiful eyes"
- euccastro 17y ago
  Actually, I have once been complimented in a bar with the phrase "you have such big eyeballs!" It was mildly flattering since I could tell she meant it as a compliment, but I felt really weird.
sylar 17y ago
GREAT!!! now I can see how you dod that thing. Unfortunately I can't carry a RMI machine every time I need, so I'll keep killing people.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  I was about to downmod you, but then I noticed your username.
bootload 17y ago
"... This is my favorite image btw - my eyeballs look awesome! ..." The immediate thing that struck me is the lack of internal structure symmetry. The folding is different between the left and the right hemisphere.
MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
Get a print and put it in your wallet. Show it to people like it's your kids or something.

axod 17y ago

Awesome :) Really interesting to see it in an easy to use UI like that. All we need now is a zoom -> enhance, zoom -> enhance. Down to the neuron level.

anigbrowl 17y ago

Nice work! Fascinating to observe the differences between your left and right hemispheres. Are the barrel distortions constant or a function of the scanner's travel? eg move the Z/blue line all the way to the front or back of the head, and the sides pincushion inwards. I couldn't make out if it was constant or not, but the shape of the Y/Red frame seemed to change as it moves from top to bottom.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

yan 17y ago

Is it possible to participate in some students project and get your head scanned for free as part of a study? That would be sweet.

n8agrin 17y ago

If you haven't ever read about how MRIs work, you should. I first learned how MRIs work in college while studying biochemistry. The same technology is used in that field, but called NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance). It is the only medical technology that still blows me away when I sit down and think about it. The people who realized they could use it to take cross-sectional scans of peoples bodies without any invasive procedure are true geniuses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging

arohner 17y ago
"Just lay down on that table, and hold still while we orient the polarization of all the water in your head. It'll be just fine." CTs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_computed_tomography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_computed_tomography) and PETs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_Emission_Tomography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_Emission_Tomography) are pretty cool as well. CTs use essentially an X-ray beam that travels in a helical path around your body, and then use math to construct a 3D image, PET is the one where you drink an isotope, and they "catch" the positrons emitted from the radioactive material in your body.
messel 17y ago
Heh, I did an NMR experiment in senior lab back in school (1995 senior lab) and had forgotten that this is precisely how MRI works (the resonance should have given it away). I wish I had my old lab book (only had a paper copy) to review the experiment now, it's fogging out big time from my memory.
- n8agrin 17y ago
  Not sure if it's true, but my prof in college told us that the reason the name was changed was because of the negative connotation of the word "nuclear". Otherwise it's exactly the same technology as NMR.
  - gcheong 17y ago
    I heard that as well from a couple profs of mine, doesn't mean it's true but it sounds reasonable.

robg 17y ago

A great intuitive way to link head mri's to actual heads. Thanks for this. I expect it will be really helpful for students. If anyone wants to get paid (usually about $30/hour) to have your head examined, search for a fMRI lab at the biggest universities in your area. You'll usually also get an image or two. If you ask nicely you may also be able to get the same type of set as here.

datums 17y ago

Nice work. How long till every one of our doctors has easy access to something like this ?

niels_olson 17y ago
Docs pretty much all have easy access to MRI, at least in the US. I have prescribed MRIs for patients in rural Louisiana. We just tell the patient "go get an MRI". Either the hospital radiology group has a scanner, or there are radiologists with MRI machines out in town. The patient just has to sign a HIPAA release so I can get the images and the radiologist's report. Fun fact: one of the failed attempts at regulating doctors was to for the government to buy machines for hospitals, thinking somehow the government would maybe somehow have some control over something, maybe who got scanned? Net effect was an explosion in high-end OR and radiology equipment.

RK 17y ago

There are a number of programs out there to look at images from MRI's, CT, etc, but if you are interested in hacking something together, the pydicom library is worth checking out. http://code.google.com/p/pydicom/ http://code.google.com/p/pydicom/

DEinspanjer 17y ago

Were you thinking about sexy women during the scan? If you focus the green axis of the scan just one click to the right from the center of your nose, your brain stem looks just like a dancer leaning against a wall.. Either that or a crucifix. Maybe you are catholic? :) Anyway, very interesting pictures. Thanks for sharing.

itodd 17y ago

Be sure to play with your study in OsiriX: http://www.osirix-viewer.com/ http://www.osirix-viewer.com/ It will build a 3d Model where you can peel back all the way to the bone.

andreas_s 17y ago

If you're in Boston (or somewhere close) and want to get your brain scanned as part of a study, look for announcements here: http://mollylab-1.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/bcs-subjects http://mollylab-1.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/bcs-subjects You'll get a CD with your images, and you'll get paid ($30 per hour, two hours on average).