I'm still Functional!

For quite awhile we've been supporting the research efforts of the Imaging Research Center. Today I was able to take advantage of their excellent services to get some additional looks inside my head. I had two goals for today: 1. get any additional insight or imagery that might help with my case, and 2. see if there was anything the world could learn by seeing if my tumor was active during certain activities.

Functional MRI allows neuroscientists to understand what parts of the brain are getting blood flow during scans, usually while the subject watches something or performs a simple cognitive activity. The idea being that the brain needs food and oxygen to do stuff, so it draws blood in when it needs it.

I spent about about half an hour in this 3T bad boy. It sang to me in all sorts of dulcet tones. The functional scans were the most musical, everything else was pretty guttural and square-wavy. The next to last scan sequence felt like the machine was being hit with a sledge-hammer. It was amazing. 

We started with a regular scan and then jumped right into the functional task. I went through about 10 rounds of watching a sequence of about 9 images. Each round was either a sequence of faces, buildings, or landscapes. When the next image in the sequence was a repeat of the immediate prior one, I clicked middle finger on a small button pad in taped under my right hand, and when it was not a repeat I clicked my first finger. There were two repeats in each round. After I got the hang of it, it was pretty easy. It's a little challenging for someone like me to lie still in these machines, but they seem to think I was pretty good at it. At least I don't get claustrophobic!

Here we have Jeff, Neal, Chad, Don, and Grace. I'm tragically leaving out Mr X who ran the functional study with me and then zipped off to go start the processing of the data.

Once we were done with the scans we sat for quite awhile with Neal to talk about the main images that they made. Neal was super patient and did an excellent job explaining what we were looking at. Here's a pretty good look at my tumor (image is flipped right-to-left), and you can definitely see it. This is the sort of "look there it is, dummy" mode of the the scanner.

 

The functional scans are still off being processed (almost certainly at TACC). I'll update as soon as I have a copy!