X-Message-Number: 1981 Date: 18 Mar 93 01:20:44 EST From: JOHN K CLARK <> Subject: CRYONICS Fun With Magnets Wouldn't it be great if you could somehow safely and painlessly make a compleat record of your brain structure. Then even if you get hit by a bus a hour after the scan the only thing you would lose would be 60 minutes of memories. well if we could just wind better magnetic coils we could. Maybe. A run of the mill Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine (MRI) can make a 3D image of an entire living CONSCIOUS brain without radiation. It can revel structures so small it would take a good magnifying glass to see. If the resolution were 100 times better perhaps we would have enough information to reconstruct the individual in a nanoteck age, especially if we also had on record the persons genetic code. I am not an expert on MRI but even I can think of two ways to increase resolution , there are probably many others. 1) Improve the software. Very recently Dr. Aaron G Filler of the University of Washington was able to image tiny nerve fibers for the first time. He did this by rewriting the software that interpret the faint signals given off by a MRI machine and convert them into pictures. 2) Increase the magnetic field. The average hospital MRI has a field of about 3000 gauss although some cheap models only have 500. The strongest magnetic field ever produced was 372000 gauss at the National Magnet Laboratory at MIT.Using a field this strong in a MRI machine would not be a trivial endeavor but as far as I know (which I admit is not very far) no new science would be needed just excellent engineering. Again I am not a MRI expert so I may have made an error in my reasoning, if so I hope someone would point it out. [ John, Brian Wowk's Feb. 19 message #1770 mentioned difficulties in distinguishing single cells deep in the brain (and thus far from the coils of the MRI) because of all the noise from the other cells throughout the brain. If you can think of a way around that, you may have a good business opportunity. - KQB ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1981