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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

I didn't expect this one would be one of those "IN MICE" things...

  In a decades-long technical tour de force led by Duke’s Center for In Vivo Microscopy with colleagues at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh and Indiana University, researchers took up the gauntlet and improved the resolution of MRI leading to the sharpest images ever captured of a mouse brain.

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It's not just "in mice", it's "in dead mice" AFAICT, as they must open the mouse to use LSM. Mice tend to not work after you open them. It also is difficult to get high resolution images of samples disturbed by sources of noise such as blood flow. I had an uninformed perspective that for a given field strength the resolution is limited by how long the subject can stay still. This is obviously a lot longer for one that isn't alive and is screwed to the platform.

I assume the 9.4T magnet is a very small bore and couldn't take a human. (E.g. https://www.monash.edu/researchinfrastructure/mbi/facilities...).

Of course, lots of important research will benefit from improved scanning resolution on dead subjects -- one might get mislead by the headline, especially if one isn't a research scientist mostly concerned with scanning things you've poisoned or genetically programmed to die in interesting ways.

Yes, several hours per image. This resolution is still an achievement. But in vivo images (alive) are much more useful as they enable longitudinal studies, but obviously far more challenging to get anything close to good resolution in a mouse. More like 150 micron in alive, sedated mouse brains, even from 9.4T.

Not true so much in mice. Because we use isogenic cohorts we get pseudo-longitudinal data per genome. Ten of you, ten of me scanned every 10 years. And we can do all 20 scans in mice within 1 month of machine time. We just finished scanning 110 mice—half young and half much older—all with balance for genomes and sex.

That's really neat. I mean, I'm reminded of the M. Night Shyamalan movie "Old," but yeah, that's really neat.

Sure, isogenic cohorts, if the lives of living creatures is valueless, that's fine. Better to work towards in-vivo whenever possible, in my opinion.

Another problem at high T MRI scanners (besides movement), is heat.

You start heating up your subjects, so you can’t scan for long.

Thanks! This is the right read of our work, instead of the false moaning about “in mice” and “not clinically useful”.

Currently, some people are (IMO deliberately) misreading your research as having immediate live human applications and spreading this news as such, with misleading graphics of human brain scans accompanying their news reports.

So sad that people focus on a mistaken belief that stuff like this could be used to diagnose disease in a patient when tools like this may someday help researchers eliminate some kinds of diseases entirely.

They took the existing components and supercharged them. This thing is exponentially more expensive per cubic inch.

Co-author here: No this is actually becoming a less expense acquisition protocol at the cost per voxel per unit of scan time. Of course not intended for clinical application but rather to understand the basic biology and genetics of Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s And Parkinson’s diseases, addiction, and aging.

Does anyone think we understand AD and how best to intervene? This technology is already proving useful. Stay tuned—-this is the tech paper but the application papers are in the wirks.

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