Personal / My MRI

My MRI-scanned head, imaged in 2007.

My good friend Dimitrios who is a postdoc professor in Biomedical Imaging, was looking for a victim in order to calibrate his MRI machine. Mostly drivenby curiosity, I offered myself for about 30 minutes. The experience was scary in the bennining, boring towards the end.

First I was scared: I had to remove any metallic object, wear earbuds (to reduce loud sounds), and some headphones (for music and communication from the control room). Then they put a grill on my face (that’s the receivine antenna, like a grid with a period of 5 - 10 cm), and from that point on you lie down and cannot move. The machine sucks you in.

That’s when the fun starts. It is an exttremely narrow space, with the eyes only 10 - 20 cm far from the wall. You can’t move, can’t speak (no one can hear from the loud noises), and the only form of communication with the outside is a small button. These are the ultimate moments of loneliness.

This is my skull:

(You can even the bump I have on the top left side of my head)

At the end, a 3D image is produced, with dimensions 256x256x256 pixels. From there on you can see all the plane cuts, and also reconstruct a 3D representation of the brain matter.