T_Bone wrote:
sir_inferno wrote:
bloodline wrote:
whabang wrote:
Been lookin' fer cancer, or somethin'? :-?
Nope, I had to learn several tasks while I had my brain scanned using an MRI scanner, so that they could observe blood flow around my brain.
I got paid to do it, and I got a tour of my brain! What you see there is just one slice.
Yeah quite a good deal, and you also get radioactive stuff injected into your brain, fun for everyone! :S
(i've got a t-shirt off one of those people :-), it reads: I've got a brain, have you?, heh heh heh, sweeeeeeet :-D)
The stuff they inject starts to produce heat when scanned... A REALLY FREAKY FEELING!!! I was in the scanner, and my veins started tingling and getting hot.
No this wasn't a PET scan!!! No injections, this is based on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, You are placed between two cryogenically cooled magnets and then radio waves are fired at your brain. The head scan you see there is a high resolution scan that took about 40min (as it works by taking slices). The Actual scans taken during the learning experiemnts only take about half a second, so they can capture two per second and they are low resolution as all they need to show is the density of blood in the brain.
When I watched my girlfriend do the same experiment, we switch on an old SGI box that was a parasite on the scan data and we could watch in real time (well 2 frames a second) the blood flowing through her head with the colours Red being the high levels through to Blue being the lowest level, this was overlaid on the high resolution image so you could see where the blood was in the head. It was really fun as they altered the test slightly without telling her and watching her brain light up like a christmas tree!