Ultrasound imaging of the brain
alephneuro.com
Ultrasound imaging of the brain
1–10 of 133 posts
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#2This is ridiculously cool, but I have a ton of questions.
> The bubbles themselves are pockets of sulfur hexafluoride encapsulated in lipid shells. They're an FDA-approved contrast agent,
Combined with ultrasound, could these be causing damage of any kind to the vasculature?
> A few years ago, a paper came out that blew our minds. The idea was that you can decode what someone is looking at just from their brain activity.
How realistically close can this get to reading thoughts, visuals, etc.?
Do we have a path to imaging people's visual cortex? Their inner lives, dialogues, memories? (Scary thought - this could be used as an interrogation tool without consent. "Did you kill Bob?" could be a simple brain scan.)
Can it be done in real time in a feedback loop and perhaps be used as an advanced reinforcement learning system?
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#3Sulfur hexafluoride escaping is exceptionally damaging as a greenhouse gas, is there nothing else they can use?
Edit: wow, serves me right for asking / not understanding that contrast means SF6...
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#4Sulfur hexafluoride escaping is exceptionally damaging as a greenhouse gas, is there nothing else they can use? Edit: wow, serves me right for asking / not understanding that contrast means SF6...
Their goal is contrast-free imaging — read the bottom of the article.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#5It feels like ultrasound is solving everything for the last week.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#6How about just getting it more established in orthopedic practices so patients aren't required to 1. See ortho for MRI referral 2. schedule mri at imaging facility 3. PAY $750 - $3000 for an MRI 4. Wait to get back into ortho.
I really don't understand why a fetus' heart can be examined for defects, but you can't use it in the office to tell me if my labrum is torn?
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#7I thought the whole "we can guess what you're thinking from an MRI" thing was BS, along the lines: take a small set of photos, image people's brains as they are looking at these pictures, to map to some low-dimensional vector of "brain activity". Then show them some of these (in sample!) pictures, measure the vector of activity and predict back what they were looking at.
Happy to be corrected. But if that's right then this... does the BS thing in a potentially less intrusive way?
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#8re: imaging red blood cells
The super-resolution trick as they’ve done it is highly reliant on the sparseness of the bubbles. If you imagine a point or a very sparse set of points at low resolution, you can fit for the locations of those points even though you don’t see them clearly. This is a common technique in radio astronomy and (I assume although I don’t have personal knowledge) astrometry, and compressed sensing was an extremely hot field a while back.
But RBCs are weird squishy things, and they fill the bloodstream quite densely, and ChatGPT estimates that they’re spaced about 20µm apart and that, when confined to a capillary, they’re about 7µm long. (And that sounds at least plausibly correct to me.)
So, even ignoring the much worse scattering properties of RBCs, they not nearly as sparse. You mostly lose a whole dimension of sparseness and up trying to resolve the entire capillary. Which seems possible but much harder. Unfortunately, brain capillaries are about 40µm apart, so the result might be a mess.
The article did not say what wavelength they’re using or what their native (wavelength/2) resolution is.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#9It feels like ultrasound is solving everything for the last week.
There were a lot of people who declared very loudly last week during the Midjourney discourse that this was an impossible use of ultrasound.
Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain
#10Is this the same tech the Midjourney scanner device is using?