Category: Speculation and Perspective

My Wish List for the Ultimate fMRI System

 

The ultimate MRI scanner cake my wife made about 6 years ago to celebrate both the 50th birthday of my colleague Sean Marrett and the installation of our new 7T scanner.

I recently had a meeting where the topic discussed was: “What would we like to see in the ideal cutting edge and future-focussed fMRI/DTI scanner?” While those who use fMRI are used to some progress being made in pulse sequences and scanner hardware, the technological capability exists to create something substantially better than we have now.

In this blog posting, I start out with a brief overview of what 
we currently have now in terms of scanner technology. The second part of this blog is then focussed on what my ideal fMRI system would have. Lastly, the article ends with a summary outline of my wish list – so if you want to get the gist of this blog, scroll to the list at the bottom. Enjoy and enter your comments! Feedback, pushback, and more ideas are welcome! 

Continue reading “My Wish List for the Ultimate fMRI System”

Ten Unique Characteristics of fMRI

A motivation for this blog is that since our graduate student days, Eric Wong and I have had hundreds of great conversations about MRI, fMRI, brain imaging, neuroscience, machine learning, and more. We finally decided to go ahead and start posting some of these, as well as thoughts of our own. It’s better – for us and hopefully others – to publicly share our thoughts, perspectives, and questions, than to keep them to ourselves. The posts are varied in topic and format. In certain areas, we know what we’re talking about, and in other others, we might be naïve or just wrong, so we welcome feedback! We also welcome guest blogs as we hope to grow the list of guest contributors and readers.  Continue reading “Ten Unique Characteristics of fMRI”

What does it mean to understand the brain?

Thanks to Peter Bandettini for the idea of starting a blog, and for offering to let me partner with him in this endeavor. We hope you find it interesting.

In this my first contribution to theBrainBlog, I would like to outline some of my initial thoughts about what a useful understanding of the human brain might look like. Continue reading “What does it mean to understand the brain?”