For anyone whose brain is still in their head and/or doesn't have 7T data, there is also FreeSurfer[1] to play with.
I only really know about the physics of MRI, so I admit I don't fully understand what the advantage of this project is against other work; I assume it would have a lot to do with the fact that the data is so much higher resolution and can identify finer structure within the brain.
> admit I don't fully understand what the advantage of this project is against other work
Replying to myself here; seems that the combination of being ex vivo and 7T means that the resolution increase over a typical in vivo patient scan is really really tremendous since your dead brain is happy to remain completely still through multi-hour sequences. The resolution you can get is primarily dependent on field strength but like many things in signal processing, you can trade integration time for higher resolution to a point. So this dataset is at about 100micron while 7T in vivo can only get down to maybe 300-1000micron (best case depending on patient movement)
Dang this sucks, I had all the files from my brain MRI when I got Dengue Fever but my laptop recently got stolen out of my car and the CD they gave it to me on was in it. This would have been fun to mess with. The MRI facility is in another country so not sure how easy it would be to get them to send me the data again (although they should I gave them 3k dollars).
Just ask them. I don’t know which country it’s in but they may be legally obligated to send it to you (maybe for a modest fee), regardless of which country you’re from. They usually are in developed countries but YMMV everywhere else.
Yeah I'm going to try and get it now. That sucks though, because that laptop was the last device I had that had a cd drive! Maybe an excuse to finally get one of those modded vintage Thinkpads with modern mobo/cpu.
There's always USB CD/DVD drives you can use, or I've even seen external USB enclosures for Desktop and Laptop CD/DVD drive form factors which you can just shove one into.
There is something a bit spooky about looking at a dead brain. To think that a person lived in that their entire life, and now it's just lying on a table not doing anything.
I guess that's true for whole bodies and all of their parts too, but something about the abstraction of removing the skin, bones, face, etc that we are used to interacting and distilling to the seat of consciousness and emotions makes it spookier.
edit: I know it was a lazy comment. but I did truly mean it. I did high-resolution imaging of the hippocampal subfields in my PhD dissertation, and I wished so much to have access to a 7T for structural imaging of those subfields...So powerful.
For those using a smaller bore diameter, 7 T is 300 MHz proton frequency, and the engineering challenges to maintain a homogeneous field over 600 mm are immense.
I only really know about the physics of MRI, so I admit I don't fully understand what the advantage of this project is against other work; I assume it would have a lot to do with the fact that the data is so much higher resolution and can identify finer structure within the brain.
[1] https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/