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Ultrasound imaging of the brain

alephneuro.com

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Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#11

Post by sheepscreek »

amluto wrote: post #8

re: 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 sensin…

I’m a complete layman to this field, but what the article did say was they’re hopeful that AI/ML can help develop a model that can pull out information such as the scattering caused by RBCs (which is present in the large volume of data gathered by the probe but is too weak to be used for manual techniques) and turn that into meaningful visuals. That’s gonna require a ton of data and that is exactly what they are trying to gather now with what they have built so far.

Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#12

Post by Aurornis »

> The bubbles themselves are pockets of sulfur hexafluoride encapsulated in lipid shells.

The high resolution images were generated by injecting sparse bubbles of this contrast agent. How sparse are they? Is the image we see a stacked set of many bubbles over time composited together?

Their aspirations at the end of doing this without the bubbles are great, but there’s a big “now draw the rest of the owl” energy around that leap. The first technique relies entirely on the bubbles, but they provide no explanation for how they think this could be achievable without the bubbles other than vaguely saying that technology is advancing.

Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#13

Post by Aurornis »

qgin wrote: post #9
w4yai wrote: post #5

It 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.

The Midjourney scanners don’t do the same thing that this is using. See how blurry the first image on the page is? That’s what you get from ultrasound through bone like the skull.

They used a trick to inject sparse bubbles into the patient and let them flow through the brain, then looked for the perturbations caused by those sparse bubbles.

The Midjourney scanners aren’t injecting this bubble contrast agent into everyone’s veins.

Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#14

Post by BurningFrog »

echelon wrote: post #2

This 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 activ…

This kind of mind reading could easily become the end of human privacy.

That's bad enough in democracies, but the consequences in more common forms of government seem really dystopian.

Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#15

Post by frangonf »

Meta is also going at it [0], which inevitably makes me ponder some orwellian questions for the near future:

If I bring my pet mouse to the cinema and my friend scans the movie back using his apple ifmri does the DRM still holds or will the mouses be DRM locked? Will my iris suffice for booting my computer or would I need to press accept all brainwave cookies? Can I email my local Flock representative to install a new Brain Pole in my neighborhood? I saw a bunch of dark thoughted young males around and my amazon think camera says the probability of missing packages increased.

[0]https://ai.meta.com/blog/tribe-v2-brain-predictive-foundatio...

Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#16

Post by Aurornis »

frangonf wrote: post #15

Meta is also going at it [0], which inevitably makes me ponder some orwellian questions for the near future: If I bring my pet mouse to the cinema and my friend scans the movie back using his apple ifmri does the DRM still holds or will the mouses be DRM locked? Will my iris suffice for booting my computer or would I need to press accept all brainwave cookies? Can I email my local Flock representative to install a ne…

Certainly the thing of sci-fi nightmares, but not practical.

All of these imaging techniques are very involved. Ultrasound requires direct contact and this technique only works with a long IV infusion of bubbles. fMRI isn’t going to be a portable device that you can point at something for many reasons.

The connection to what you’re thinking is more sci-fi than reality. This technique could theoretically see some changes in blood flow to different regions, but what would that mean? Is the patient having anxiety, or are they just nervous about the IV injecting bubbles into them to travel to their brain and the machine attached to their head?

Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#17

Post by [deleted] »

frangonf wrote: post #15

Meta is also going at it [0], which inevitably makes me ponder some orwellian questions for the near future: If I bring my pet mouse to the cinema and my friend scans the movie back using his apple ifmri does the DRM still holds or will the mouses be DRM locked? Will my iris suffice for booting my computer or would I need to press accept all brainwave cookies? Can I email my local Flock representative to install a ne…

[deleted]

Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#18

Post by Aurornis »

amluto wrote: post #8

re: 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 sensin…

Showing us a technique that is entirely reliant on sparseness and then saying they hope to employ it on something that isn’t sparse at all (blood cells) does feel misleading.

I’m filing this in the category of technologies I wish could be true, but for which no plausible path to overcoming the obvious limitations has been provided.

Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#19

Post by qgin »

Aurornis wrote: post #13
qgin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a lot of people who declared very loudly last week during the Midjourney discourse that this was an impossible use of ultrasound.

The Midjourney scanners don’t do the same thing that this is using. See how blurry the first image on the page is? That’s what you get from ultrasound through bone like the skull. They used a trick to inject sparse bubbles into the patient and let them flow through the brain, then looked for the perturbations caused by those sparse bubbles. The Midjourney scanners aren’t injecting this bubble contrast agent into ever…

Absolutely, but it was claims about ultrasound in general

Re: Ultrasound imaging of the brain

#20

Post by paytonjjones »

frangonf wrote: post #15

Meta is also going at it [0], which inevitably makes me ponder some orwellian questions for the near future: If I bring my pet mouse to the cinema and my friend scans the movie back using his apple ifmri does the DRM still holds or will the mouses be DRM locked? Will my iris suffice for booting my computer or would I need to press accept all brainwave cookies? Can I email my local Flock representative to install a ne…

The current state of the world, where we have insane and ubiquitous surveillance tech but our packages are nevertheless being constantly stolen (with the thieves "caught" under said surveillance but with no one bothering to enforce it), is certainly an interesting one.

I wonder what Orwell would have thought.

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