Another take on MRI…
Posted on October 25, 2006
Filed Under All, Technology |
Turns out writer Bruce Sterling had an MRI, thirteen years ago, and wrote about same in a piece entitled Magnetic Vision. Writes Mr. Sterling:
“These are magnetic windows into the lightless realm inside my skull. The meat, bone, and various gristles within my head glow gently in crisp black-and-white detail. There’s little of the foggy ghostliness one sees with, say, dental x-rays. Held up against a bright light, or placed on a diagnostic light table, the dark plastic sheets reveal veins, arteries, various odd fluid-stuffed ventricles, and the spongey wrinkles of my cerebellum. In various shots, I can see the pulp within my own teeth, the roots of my tongue, the boney caverns of my sinuses, and the nicely spherical jellies that are my two eyeballs. I can see that the human brain really does come in two lobes and in three sections, and that it has gray matter and white matter. The brain is a big whopping gland, basically, and it fills my skull just like the meat of a walnut.”
He also notes that “MRIs are as narrow as the grave, and also very loud, with sharp mechanical clacking and buzzing.” Our plan is to shortly publish our brain pictures… 21st century-style family pix, our kids, the dog, my brain…
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5 Responses to “Another take on MRI…”
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. . . a new technology love . . .
Heh… these machines are fascinating.. I’m still trying to understand the exact mechanism that underlie the signals they read. Trés interessant… Some of these machines, like the MSI run on Linux and have major CPU horsepower to process the signals.
I was kind of hoping they’d put me in a 3 Tesla machine - the latest and greatest, but 1.5 Tesla was apparently more than adequate for my study. Aneurologist in San Jose told me that the software packages that come with the machines make a major difference in the quailty of the scan…
Interesting, I never knew how expensive or revolutionary MRI was.
. . . all for the price of a short, and relative, confinement — and co-pays . . .
Does fascination, curiosity, and exploration subjugate fear? Next, you’ll be spelunking . . .
[…] Bruce Sterling’s brain/walnut analogy would seem quite apt, given the appearance of the MRI below. It really does look like a walnut in this particular image slice. Some of the other slices look very different… […]