Week 5 - Bo

This week I devoted most of my time on my project. This project is to write a book on how to operate a MRI scanner for people who have never used it. It is related to my research book but it is also quite new for me because operating a scanner is quite different from running a program or designing an algorithm. I worked with Mitch and Cynthia on this book. For the past weeks I have done some initial work but was not very productive. We already finished the first two chapters which are about the fundamentals of operating a scanner and some safety issues. For an outsider, the safety issue can be much more important as thought intuitively. In the scanner room, people are faced with a very strong magnetic field which can cause great hazard if any iron is brought into the room. The rapid changing RF field can deposit heat into metal which is also harmful if it is inside the body. Also the superconductive system contains cryogen and liquid nitrogen. Any inappropriate operation can lead to disasters. Oh, it seems that using MR scanner is so dangerous...while the point is that if you obey the rule in MRI room, everything would work fine. And this is what we want to include in the first two parts, that is, to give people an intuitive idea of how a scanner works and what to pay attention to in the operation.

Besides revising previous work, I wrote a chapter which teaches brain scan this week. There are many pre-installed protocols in the MRI scanner. Even for brain scan, there are many depends on what function you want to see or what symptoms the patient is . In the book, we use a general protocol which includes several basic series to show the brain functions. A set of such series can give sagittal and coronal plane images of the brain. We scanned several volunteers including David and Fai. In this week, we rely more and more on ourselves not others' instructions. The scanning process went on smoothly without any mistakes. Just as Dr. Prince said, after the initial stage, you will get accelerated fast in learning how to scan. That is what we experienced this week. Besides the brain images, we also have to collect screenshot for book illustration. Through writing a chapter, I know it is hard to narrate what you know to others. Sometimes, it takes patience to do a good job. What we know is not necessarily natural to others. So writing a book without missing "trivial " things for the writer and make the knowledge easy to follow is a skill. I am learning this and hope to know more.