• Question: What part of the body creates a cool picture?

    Asked by Tavy to Andy on 13 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Andrew Scott

      Andrew Scott answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      Hi River,

      You can get MRI pictures of pretty much any body part and I think most of them can look pretty cool. You could say that the really detailed pictures of the joints, like the knee are cool. Loads of work has been done in the brain, where you can look at the connections in the brain (see some pictures here: http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/gallery/) or look at which bits of the brain are used for different activities (possibly even read your mind:http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140717-i-can-read-your-mind).

      I’m less interested in brains. I think that your brain is simply trying to look after itself by telling you it’s interesting!

      I think we did some pretty cool stuff when we scanned a singer for his music video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_964dqQxQwY). We developed those techniques to help surgeons and speech therapists diagnose and treat children with a cleft palate, who often have trouble speaking and swallowing.

      At the moment I work on MRI of the heart, which I think is really cool. The brain stays pretty still while you scan it, but your heart beats about 60 times per minute and goes up and down while you breathe. This means that it’s much more difficult to get good pictures of the heart, but we can learn so much about it. There’s some nice pictures from the work in my department here: http://www.jcmr-online.com/content/16/1/87/figure/F2 and some movies from the University of Auckland: http://atlas.scmr.org/cineplayer.html. I’ll try and get some more pictures from our work to add.

Comments