A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
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Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
#2Code/data for replication: https://github.com/bispmri/Ultra-low-field-MRI-Scanner
Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
#3This is cool. Don't get me wrong. You could build this in your garage maybe. But those scans are useless for what I do in my research. The resolution and contrast it provides are just too low. Edit: for neuroscience research..I hadn't considered any clinical utility.
Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
#4The images are better that I expected.
The ‘FLAIR like’ image is not particularly FLAIR like. FLAIR are nicer to look at when fat saturated (not everyone agrees with that), but that’s probably not feasible at that field strength and adding scan time would be a problem on these long sequences.
Voxel sizes of 2x2x10 are pretty terrible resolution, but if the alternative is nothing, I guess that’s ok.
The static field is so low, I’m impressed it works at all.
Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
#5woah. woah. woah. hold on a second here... are we comfortable enough with understanding all of the behavior of deep learning models to where we can confidently put them in the pipeline for diagnostic clinical imaging?
i'm okay with using them for image analysis, but denoising and other image production tasks seems dangerous. how do you know what you're looking at is real as opposed to something that just looks convincing? (like deep neural nets are famous for producing)
Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
#6woah. woah. woah. hold on a second here... are we comfortable enough with understanding all of the behavior of deep learning models to where we can confidently put them in the pipeline for diagnostic clinical imaging? i'm okay with using them for image analysis, but denoising and other image production tasks seems dangerous. how do you know what you're looking at is real as opposed to something that just looks convin…
Agreed, but I believe "using AI for inference from sparse observations" is unfortunately a thing already.
Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
#7Don't they already have something like this in the field?
https://hyperfine.io
Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
#8woah. woah. woah. hold on a second here... are we comfortable enough with understanding all of the behavior of deep learning models to where we can confidently put them in the pipeline for diagnostic clinical imaging? i'm okay with using them for image analysis, but denoising and other image production tasks seems dangerous. how do you know what you're looking at is real as opposed to something that just looks convin…
This project doesn't use AI to improve the image, they use it to estimate the EMI noise from the surroundings. So they're not "filling in the gaps" in the actual resulting 3D voxel volume with fantasy voxels (which I hope will never ever fly in a clinical setting).
"To tackle the EMI signals from the external environments and internal low-cost electronics during scanning, we developed a deep learning driven EMI cancellation scheme"
So it's kind of using deep learning to improve the SnR in the RF reception. Of course this could theoretically also lead to "fantasy voxels" but due to the nature of MRI decoding, I'm willing to guess that bad predictions of the EMI interference will not show up as unnoticeable alterations of realistic tissue imaging but rather as artefacts all over the volume, like you normally see in clinical MRIs that weren't taken 100% optimally.
Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
#9woah. woah. woah. hold on a second here... are we comfortable enough with understanding all of the behavior of deep learning models to where we can confidently put them in the pipeline for diagnostic clinical imaging? i'm okay with using them for image analysis, but denoising and other image production tasks seems dangerous. how do you know what you're looking at is real as opposed to something that just looks convin…
It's better than nothing. Let's start with those situations, and slowly build a database proving or disproving this technology.
Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner
#10woah. woah. woah. hold on a second here... are we comfortable enough with understanding all of the behavior of deep learning models to where we can confidently put them in the pipeline for diagnostic clinical imaging? i'm okay with using them for image analysis, but denoising and other image production tasks seems dangerous. how do you know what you're looking at is real as opposed to something that just looks convin…
It's better than nothing. Let's start with those situations, and slowly build a database proving or disproving this technology.
>However, MRI accessibility is low and extremely inhomogeneous around the world. According to the 2020 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) statistics, there are approximately 65,000 installations of MRI scanners worldwide (~7 per million inhabitants)
Given that my little podunk hospital in the midwest seems to have roughly 5x the worldwide average number of MRI machines, totally agree.