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IBM Creates MRI With 100M Times the Resolution
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 13, 2009 05:09 PM
from the little-tiny-hairs dept.
from the little-tiny-hairs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "IBM Research scientists, in collaboration with the Center for Probing the Nanoscale at Stanford University, have demonstrated magnetic resonance imaging with volume resolution 100 million times finer than conventional MRI. This result, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, signals a significant step forward in tools for molecular biology and nanotechnology by offering the ability to study complex 3D structures at the nanoscale."
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Submission: IBM Creates MRI With 100 Million Times Finer Res by Anonymous Coward
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High levels of radiation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:High levels of radiation (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:High levels of radiation (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:High levels of radiation (Score:5, Informative)
My understanding of this specific MRI technology is that its applications are similar to that of an electron microscope.
Unless you plan on crawling into a pitri dish your precious little thoughts should be safe. You don't even need tinfoil!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:High levels of radiation (Score:5, Funny)
The Doctor: Um, that big, erm, machine thing - is it supposed to be making that noise?
Florence Finnegan: You wouldn't understand.
The Doctor: But isn't that a magnetic resonance imaging thing? Like a ginormous sort of a magnet? I did Magnetics GCSE. Well, I failed, but all the same...
Florence Finnegan: A magnet with its setting now increased to 50,000 tesla.
The Doctor: Ooh, that's a bit strong. Isn't it?
Florence Finnegan: It'll send out a magnetic pulse that'll fry the brain stems of every living thing within 250,000 miles. Except for me. Safe in this room.
The Doctor: But hold on, hold on. I did Geography GCSE. I passed that one. Doesn't that distance include the Earth?
Florence Finnegan: Only the side facing the moon. The other half will survive. Call it my gift.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing wrong with that was that it stole a basic Star Trek trope, the "reversal of polarity".
I was about to object, but then checked the dates and Star Trek (original series) does predate the Third Doctor's "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" [wikipedia.org] (1966-1969 vs. 1970-1974).
Instead I say, well played sir!
Re:High levels of radiation (Score:5, Funny)
This is DOCUMENTED FACT as established by Dr. Paul C. Lauterbur in 1971 through research papers (suppressed as unpublished)
Aha, an undocumented documented fact. Well, I'm convinced.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You forgot the bit about the Time Cube!
Re:High levels of radiation (Score:4, Funny)
You forgot the bit about the Time Cube!
And being invented by Shampoo!
(A gift of peace in all good faith.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And I'm making myself... (Score:3, Funny)
...not a tinfoil hat, but rather, a hat made from Mu-metal [wikipedia.org].
This is great to see (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if only HP and AT&T would bring back their R&D departments we might see more companies doing basic research like this.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
uploading (Score:3, Interesting)
Now we are getting closer. Once you can extract the raw brain data, you can simulate the data. You can 'live' forever if they can get the raw data out.
Adapting inputs to the simulation and that simulation can interact with you...
H.
Re:uploading (Score:5, Funny)
But would you want to live forever in a Windows Vista Box. You are thinking naughty things, cancel or allow.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yea but it would be pronounced so loud, that everyone would know.
Re:Not really. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Interesting! (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if it can resolve individual dendrite connections in the brain. If so, we've just developed our first brain scanner capable of mapping a living brain's circuitry. Which means, in principle, we now possess all the technology required to model a human brain, or for that matter (but at extreme cost), create a synthetic one. Though, at present, we have no way of truly providing it with the interface necessary for communication or interaction with the physical world.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Interesting! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Interesting! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
A cat is fine too. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Interesting! (Score:4, Funny)
No problem:
for (;;) {
for (i=1000 ; i ; i--)
printf("meow\n");
cough_up_hairball();
}
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you need a call to rand(), a switch statement, and some additional function calls like sleep_in_sun(), eat(), shit(), scratch_aimlessly_at_litter(), tear_through_the_house_for_no_apparent_reason(), etc.
Re:Interesting! (Score:5, Funny)
I think you need a call to rand(), a switch statement, and some additional function calls like sleep_in_sun(), eat(), shit(), scratch_aimlessly_at_litter(), tear_through_the_house_for_no_apparent_reason(), etc.
It's C. The cough_up_hairball() function has undocumented side effects, including all of he aforementioned.
Additionally, after 0, the i register underflows when compiled with a particular gcc switch, setting the carry flag and incrementing a pointer in another register. This modifies the LSB of a pointer to an entry in a 256-entry lookup-table that is randomly populated with function pointers which also call those functions. After UNSIGNED_INT_MAX NOPs, the loop starts again.
Now, in C++, he could have just overloaded the "<<" operator to do all of that.
Parent
Re:Interesting! (Score:4, Funny)
It's C. The cough_up_hairball() function has undocumented side effects, including all of he aforementioned.
Now, in C++, he could have just overloaded the "<<" operator to do all of that.
Well, at least it's better than cat implemented in Java:
AnimalInstance ourCat = new Cat ...
ourCat.meow()
ourCat.sleep_in_sun()
ourCat.eat()
ourCat.tear_through_house_for_no_apparent_reason()
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
at
org.slashdot.animal.Cat.tear_through_house_for_no_apparent_reason()
*sigh* Oh Java.
Parent
Re:Interesting! (Score:4, Informative)
This device won't work on large samples (think brain) because the detection mechanism is a microcantilever. It will work for small particles, since the resonant frequency of the cantilever can remain high with only a small mass on the end. Large objects will simply make the detector extremely slow and insensitive. While a whole brain won't work, I'd expect a few cells or small tissue sample might be possible to image, giving impressive detail on the chemical pathways in the cell and between cells.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if it can resolve individual dendrite connections in the brain. If so, we've just developed our first brain scanner capable of mapping a living brain's circuitry. Which means, in principle, we now possess all the technology required to model a human brain
One problem I can see is bandwidth. You would need to be able to stream all the state changes in the brain through your instrument. Thats a lot of data, and would require a lot of processing power.
Re:Interesting! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Interesting! (Score:5, Informative)
One problem is that though this machine has great spatial resolution (precision in space)....it may not have great temporal resolution (precision in time).
In regards to your curiosity about imaging dendritic connections: It may image where/how the connections are made, which is a great leap for Neuroanatomists. But it cannot measure or record the hundreds of thousands of mechanisms and live actions that the dendrites/axons/cell bodies and their connections make during every one action potential that takes place...Even if this machine could measure outside the nanoscale.
Here's why: Neurons may fire a number of action potentials in millisecond time and increase/decrease in volume as the influx of sodium brings in water into the cell causing it to expand. As enough sodium (positively charged particals) are in the cell causing a depolarization, the voltage-gated ion channels shut off and K+ outflux/Na+ influx ceases. The cell hyperpolarizes, shrinks in volume and it's morphology is changed drastically once again. To capture all this change with such fine resolution is a feat, that sadly, cannot be accoplished by this 3D Machine--since everything it measures must be fixed and perfectly still. What neuroscientist use now for "partial real time brain imaging" is a function MRI or fMRI which measure changes in metabolism (glucose metabolism to be exact) but compromises the great spatial resolution this 3D machine has for the temporal resolution.
Parent
Storage Monster (Score:2, Insightful)
High resolution but small volume (Score:5, Informative)
C. L. Degen, M. Poggio, H. J. Mamin, C. T. Rettner, D. Rugar Nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging [pnas.org] PNAS 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0812068106 [doi.org].
The abstract:
I think it's important to emphasize that this is a nanoscale magnetic imaging technique. The summary implies that they created a conventional MRI that has nanoscale resolution, as if they can now image a person's brain and pick out individual cells and molecules. That is not the case! And that is likely to never be possible (given the frequencies of radiation that MRI uses and the diffraction limit [wikipedia.org] that applies to far-field imaging.
That having been said, this is still a very cool and noteworthy piece of science. Scientists use a variety of nanoscale imaging tools (atomic force microscopes [wikipedia.org], electron microscopes [wikipedia.org], etc.), but having the ability to do nanoscale magnetic imaging is amazing. In the article they do a 3D reconstruction of a tobacco mosaic virus. One of the great things about MRI is that is has some amount of chemical selectivity: there are different magnetic imaging modes that can differentiate based on makeup. This nanoscale analog can use similar tricks: instead of just getting images of surface topography or electron density, it could actually determine the chemical makeup within nanostructures. I expect this will become a very powerful technique for nano-imaging over the next decade.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just out of curiosity... if you can image specific viruses in a sample of, say, blood, then would it be possible to do extremely reliable blood screening of any and all known viruses by matching the reconstituted image of each object (or a suitably long cryptographic hash thereof) against a database of known viruses? One of the problems with identifying specific viral strains seems to be that it takes an extremely long time, often relies on the detection of the antibodies rather than the viruses themselves
Link to the PNAS abstract (Score:2, Informative)
Transporter? (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder if this is fine enough to be able to distinguish the type and state of a molecule. If so, then you should be able to scan an entire person and store the result.
Then at a later date (when the technology becomes available) you should be able to re-create that person.
The beginnings of a transporter.
Re:Transporter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. A transporter that works like the visible man.
Step 1: die. (not strictly necessary, but makes the remaining steps more pleasant.)
Step 2: freeze body in great big ice cube. agitate and freeze rapidly to avoid bubbles and crystals.
step 3: put ice block on giant deli slicer. Use "1 cell thick" setting.
step 4: further divide ice slice into pieces small enough to use with the MRI device. Carefully label the position of each piece.
step 5: painstakingly scan each piece and store in appropriate database.
step 6: repeat steps 3 through 5 over the next several months until no slices remain.
step 7: ?
step 8: arrive at destination, nearly perfectly reconstructed and only a little bit dead (just your brains. and organs)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if this is fine enough to be able to distinguish the type and state of a molecule. If so, then you should be able to scan an entire person and store the result.
Then at a later date (when the technology becomes available) you should be able to re-create that person.
The beginnings of a transporter.
Unfortunately, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle [wikipedia.org] dictates that in scanning the position of the particles, you also change their state. You can in short never know everything you need to know about a system to identically replicate it elsewhere.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's true that the precise location of individual ions would be slightly misplaced. However, as long as the wiring of neurons was accurately recreated it might work.
So while the 'recreated' organism would not be 'exactly' the same as the scanned organism, it might be good enough.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So while the 'recreated' organism would not be 'exactly' the same as the scanned organism, it might be good enough.
Hey - that's what my wife tells me all the time!
But the real question is: (Score:5, Funny)
not a valid comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
kebes already pretty much said it, and as I said (under a different name) on Digg,
Saying "100 million times stronger than MRI" is a deceptive way to describe this. The normal usage of MRI that the public is familiar with is to scan your body, or parts of your body. This new technology would work on a "sample," for instance a biopsy. If the new technology operated at the same scale - your whole body - and was at 100 million times finer resolution - then that would be astounding.
But this is a competitor for other microscopes - not MRI.
20 years ago when I was at Stanford. (Score:5, Interesting)
20 years ago when I was at Stanford they were experimenting with MRI Microscopy.
They were able to image 1/10 mm resolution of the inside of a common snail. Just using miniature coils.
My group was using the same machine to map blood flow volume and direction using MRI.
The article doesn't explain what they are doing in much detail. Even the little video is vague.
This advancement was enabled by a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM), which relies on detecting ultrasmall magnetic forces.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Yea - a high-def version of this [scienceblogs.com]!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Isn't this just.... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Similar to MEG? (Score:5, Informative)
The technique the article discusses, however, is not to measure the magnetic properties of a bunch of atoms, but to make a picture of a sample by scanning atom by atom. A very precisely constructed magnetic needle scans over a surface, in this case, the surface of a virus. Whenever the needle hovers over a hydrogen nucleus, the nucleus flips, generating a tiny force that pushes down on the stage the virus is mounted on. By recording each of these events, a map is generated of all of the hydrogen nuclei the needle passed over. It's a great way to look at protein structure, but an awfully slow way to look at a brain.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Fuck twitter.
No seriously, I hope they relocate to the Mediterranean and get their cables cut every week.