Education, tips and tricks to help you conduct better fMRI experiments.
Sure, you can try to fix it during data processing, but you're usually better off fixing the acquisition!

Saturday, November 6, 2010

FOD for thought.

As my scanner is down at the moment, with service engineers tearing things apart to identify some sources of spikes, there’s a bit of a delay in getting the resting state data I promised a couple of weeks ago. Please standby, normal service will be resumed shortly. For the time being I thought I’d continue the topic of ‘foreign objects and debris.’ Changing tacks a little bit, away from the insidious, small stuff, I thought it might be edifying to take a look at the big stuff – the stuff with major safety implications.

If you’re a regular fMRIer then you will already have been treated to safety videos demonstrating the sorts of bad things that can happen to a watermelon or a brick wall when magnetic objects are allowed to impact an MRI magnet. If you’re an fMRI newbie, welcome. May I suggest you spend a few minutes checking out YouTube videos for your enlightenment? Here are links to some goodies:

Oxygen cylinder 1 – 0 Watermelon

The rear wall of an MRI suite gets a good bashing from an oxygen cylinder

One wonders whether someone had been sitting on this chair when it started to move…

More watermelon abuse

And here is a video of some tests we did with an old 4 T magnet that was about to be decommissioned. We did a chair, too, but ours was deliberate:



Fun, eh? Sure, this stuff is exhilarating when it’s intentional and controlled. But I bet you don’t fancy being the person responsible for stabbing your subject repeatedly with the pair of scissors that you accidentally carried into the magnet room.