Noodle Mirror
WARNING: HIGH GEEK CONTENT
The ultimate mirror glance! After 30+ years of wondering what the "I" of IthinkthereforIam fame actually looks like, I finally got around to visualizing the surface of my brain , thanks to MRIcro, a really nifty piece of brain imaging freeware by Chris Rorden. That and a 22.5 MB file of my 3T brain scan, courtesy of the lovely and fabulously multi-talented Noo - who also made this picture:
No, I didn't really need to get my brain scanned but getting a free scan was a nice geeky reward cookie for lying still in a dark tunnel for 45 minutes and being Noo's lab rat.
The ever professional Noo thinks MRIcro is pretty basic actually, but since I am only at sandcastle level on the vast beach of neuroscience, I am plenty happy mucking about with it.
Before discovering MRIcro, and desperately curious enough to spend some time reverse engineering the scan file, I managed to hexedit out the relevant sections of the file and spoof a .bmp header to create images of each of the individual slices. But since each voxel field was 16-bits wide with the first 8-bits mostly zeroes, the inital 8-bit grayscale bitmap had a weird squished and striated look.
Re-scaling the width in a photo editor kinda fixed it. But doing it thusly by hand for all 180 slices would have been a fairly maddening exercise so eventually a nifty python script did the job. Using more freeware I ended up making some movies of progressive noodle slices. You might recognize me in the slightly macabre Front Scan.
One of the flicks even had a small cameo role in a wonderful local play.
The ultimate mirror glance! After 30+ years of wondering what the "I" of IthinkthereforIam fame actually looks like, I finally got around to visualizing the surface of my brain , thanks to MRIcro, a really nifty piece of brain imaging freeware by Chris Rorden. That and a 22.5 MB file of my 3T brain scan, courtesy of the lovely and fabulously multi-talented Noo - who also made this picture:
No, I didn't really need to get my brain scanned but getting a free scan was a nice geeky reward cookie for lying still in a dark tunnel for 45 minutes and being Noo's lab rat.
The ever professional Noo thinks MRIcro is pretty basic actually, but since I am only at sandcastle level on the vast beach of neuroscience, I am plenty happy mucking about with it.
Before discovering MRIcro, and desperately curious enough to spend some time reverse engineering the scan file, I managed to hexedit out the relevant sections of the file and spoof a .bmp header to create images of each of the individual slices. But since each voxel field was 16-bits wide with the first 8-bits mostly zeroes, the inital 8-bit grayscale bitmap had a weird squished and striated look.
Re-scaling the width in a photo editor kinda fixed it. But doing it thusly by hand for all 180 slices would have been a fairly maddening exercise so eventually a nifty python script did the job. Using more freeware I ended up making some movies of progressive noodle slices. You might recognize me in the slightly macabre Front Scan.
One of the flicks even had a small cameo role in a wonderful local play.
posted by RescuedMan at 11:46 PM
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