It's looking good. Certainly much smaller than the roomful of metal we are used to seeing in hospitals.
Do you remember when computers used to fill entire rooms? Now take a look at your cell phone. Now think MRI in 10-20 years...
See what I'm getting at?
I am patiently waiting for the time when MRIs are small and light enough to be mounted on heads of freely behaving animals (in the wild or in captivity), at least large animals like elephants, dolphins, horses, crocs or sharks... Then you use radiotelemetry to get the info loaded on your computer and you observe the brain activity in real time as the animal is interacting with its environment.
I hope this happens while I am still young and active enough to use such technology in research...
Comments
Hilarity ensues when dolphin's head gets magnetically attached to passing ship! :P
Posted by: Snarfevs | September 17, 2006 11:17 AM
Since MRIs depend on strong magnetic fields rather than integrated circuitry, why would you expect them to follow the same progression as computers?
Posted by: somnilista, FCD | September 17, 2006 1:45 PM
As long as they can measure brain activity on a fine spatial and temporal scale, I do not care how they work. It is up to engineers to figure out. We do not have catode tubes in our TVs either.
Posted by: coturnix | September 17, 2006 5:19 PM
i kinda go for the day when it'll be like star trek and they just pass a magic wand over you. but if portable mri's are the next step i guess we'll have to put up wiith the crude :)
Posted by: scout | September 17, 2006 7:02 PM
I talked to an engineer grad student at Berkeley and he said that's what he and others were working on-- to make them like tasers or hand-held scanners.
Posted by: Jenna | September 18, 2006 4:06 PM
Back in 1964, one of my final bio-chemistry papers was " What main developments do you think will happen in our understanding of bio-chemistry by 1984".
After writing a couple of hours of tedious , solid stuff I launched into a sci-fi story I had read which described hown earthlings had ventured to new planets. One intrepid explorer did some sort of brain fusion with a creature on the planet so that he could experience life and its hazards from the creature's viewpoint. I cannot remember the name of the story nor the author, but your portable MRI reminded me of it.
As I recall the earthling lived
Posted by: Leon Kreitzman | September 22, 2006 5:19 PM
Back in 1964, one of my final bio-chemistry papers was " What main developments do you think will happen in our understanding of bio-chemistry by 1984".
After writing a couple of hours of tedious , solid stuff I launched into a sci-fi story I had read which described hown earthlings had ventured to new planets. One intrepid explorer did some sort of brain fusion with a creature on the planet so that he could experience life and its hazards from the creature's viewpoint. I cannot remember the name of the story nor the author, but your portable MRI reminded me of it.
As I recall the earthling lived
Posted by: Leon Kreitzman | September 22, 2006 5:21 PM