
100-hour MRI captures the most detailed view yet of a whole human brain - howard941
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mri-scan-most-detailed-look-yet-whole-human-brain
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jfengel
For those wondering how somebody sits still for 100 hours in an MRI, the
answer is contained in the word "postmortem" in the subhead.

This isn't functional MRI, which observes the brain as it's working. This is a
very high resolution static picture at a tens-of-microns scale. Assuredly very
useful, but different from fMRI, which is what I first associate when somebody
says "MRI" and "brain".

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99052882514569
>fMRI, which is what I first associate when somebody says "MRI" and "brain".

That's an odd first-association. fMRI is not used much outside the brain, but
neuroimaging relies on structural contrasts (i.e. "normal" MRI) and diffusion
imaging (a proxy for looking at axonal connectivity) just as much as on
functional ones.

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UI_at_80x24
I wonder if any patients in coma's were considered. I'd think it would be
tremendously valuable to compare the difference between a living and a 'dead'
brain.

*This might get into philosophical realm of brain dead vs alive. I'm just talking about 'active blood flow' and let the additional nuance about the other things be worried about by somebody who isn't me.

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elil17
Even the movement of blood through the brain can cause blur at this scale. The
person needs to be _very_ dead for this to work.

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dano
The breakthrough is the MRI system itself with this particular scan
demonstrating an enormous new potential. The underlying research paper is at
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/649822v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/649822v1)

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codedokode
Is not 0.1 mm too coarse? Neurons are much smaller. Also, I wonder what is the
black hole in the middle of the left image?

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electricviolet
I believe that dark area is the corpus callosum
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum))
-- bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.

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smtpserver
That is above/around the black area. The black area is the lateral ventricle.
It normally contains cerebrospinal fluid, however on the image it is empty.

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smtpserver
Here is one from a living person with 0.25mm resolution (data is also
available to download)
[https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201732](https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201732)

Scan time here is 53 minutes.

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bynkman
The average human brain is 1450 cubic centimeters. With a resolution of 0.1
millimeters, that's 100 * 100 * 100 data points in a cubic centimeter. For
approximately 1.45 billion data points for one brain!

