Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 151 posts

Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

#51

Post by toiletfuneral »

ISL wrote: post #47

Edit: This post was intended as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30209618 , presently below > The lead author, Dr. Craig Bennett, wanted to get something fresh, so he headed in to the grocery story first thing in the morning. At the fish counter, he spoke the words that will echo down the centuries as a testimony to the dedication and drive of neuroscientists throughout the ages: >"I need a full length…

Made a a pretty sick vacuum tube in high school with clear acrylic and put a shrader valve on it so it could be easily decompressed with an auto shop ac recharge machine. I won the shit out that science fair showing a feather drop like a rock

Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

#52

Post by datavirtue »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #48
gnatman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Towards the bottom: "Such scanner can be made low cost to manufacture, maintain and operate. For quantity production, we estimate hardware material costs under USD20K."

That's cheap...just not cheap enough for me to want to build it in my garage as a party gag.

I have seen people of modest means build cars that cost five times that in their garage. ...and that was twenty years ago.

Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

#53

Post by neuronexmachina »

phkahler wrote: post #28
walterbell wrote: post #2

Code/data for replication: https://github.com/bispmri/Ultra-low-field-MRI-Scanner

Some of the code is Matlab. I wonder if GNU octave is sufficient to run it. That would be a big savings for studying this.

The only Matlab file seems to just be be ~30 lines of code for reading HDF5 files and plotting some results, nothing too complicated or critical: https://github.com/bispmri/Ultra-low-field-MRI-Scanner/blob/...

It looks like the bulk of the code for training the EMI elimination model is is pretty straightforward PyTorch.

Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

#54

Post by carbocation »

This sort of technology offers a lot of value for understanding human health in the future.

Right now, we (physicians) discourage people from getting tested outside of guidelines because we don't know what to do with incidental findings. But you could imagine that as a society, we would like to detect and understand these things, rather than just remain ignorant to them.

Inexpensive technology like this could be perfect for performing large-scale studies with repeated sampling of volunteers over time, to gain information that can help the next generation.

Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

#55

Post by an1sotropy »

lostlogin wrote: post #4

The 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 i…

I think it is amazing that they're getting decent ADC maps - diffusion imaging is fundamentally about measuring how much the image gets dimmer (due to diffusion sensitizing gradients), so it's always running up against SNR limits. This is so darn cool.

Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

#56

Post by robwwilliams »

carbocation wrote: post #54

This sort of technology offers a lot of value for understanding human health in the future. Right now, we (physicians) discourage people from getting tested outside of guidelines because we don't know what to do with incidental findings. But you could imagine that as a society, we would like to detect and understand these things, rather than just remain ignorant to them. Inexpensive technology like this could be perf…

And perfect for very high false discovery rates and unnecessary downstream diagnostic burden and iatrogenic errors. Rather see a focus on new magnet technologies to reduce cost without loss if already marginal clinical MRI resolution.

Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

#57

Post by robwwilliams »

jacquesm wrote: post #31
ortusdux wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad that this is the approach that they are taking. There have been plenty of issues with fMRI false positives due to misconfigured software. The most famous would probably be the IG Nobel winning study that detected brain activity in a store-bought salmon: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe... https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/fmri-gets-slap-in-the-... Later studies called into que…

> The most famous would probably be the IG Nobel winning study that detected brain activity in a store-bought salmon: A store-bought dead salmon. I am assuming that most salmons bought in stores are dead but that particular detail is rather relevant here. Also that had me laughing, what a great move.

Not sure the dead salmon is relevant. That paper is focused on false discovery in FUNCTIONAL MRI. Different can of fish. Most clinical work is structural MRI.

Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

#58

Post by VikingCoder »

aidenn0 wrote: post #45
VikingCoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "unfortunate." Sparse observations save lives. A quicker MR. Less X-Ray exposure. It's totally valid to worry about validation, but to the degree you can validate image processing algorithms of any kind - AI or otherwise - they absolutely save lives.

NMRI use microwaves, not x-rays.

I was talking about MR and CT. Applies to PET, too.

Image processing saves lives.

Re: A low-cost and shielding-free ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner

#59

Post by robwwilliams »

scratcheee wrote: post #12
a-dub wrote: post #5

woah. 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…

Exactly my thoughts too. I'm fine with a simple noise-removal pass, but if the AI is context-aware, what's to stop it saying "hmm, this brain would look more like a normal brain if I remove these tumors". Obviously, they'll test for that, but that only handles common cases they concider, it's always going to be a risk for more unusual sceanrios, and the danger with altering the data is that anyone looking at the resu…

The ML denoising is within-sample across voxels—-or so I presume from similar work in small animal MRI. And you can always have the “with” and “without”. I do not see any problem if a radiologist is in the review process.
Post reply on HN