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[DISCUSSION] Radiologists, how many MRI phantoms does your team have?

I got into an interesting discussion at work about an MRI sequence I've never used before. For context, I did a bunch of brain imaging in grad school, and now at work I'm encountering things that aren't the brain. Shocking.

The technique in question is trying to look at the amount of cartilage in a joint. I assumed the best way to identify potential problems with the MRI is to use a phantom like this one: https://www.truephantom.com/product/adult-knee/. We did this in grad school, but our phantom was basically an expensive jug of fancy water, which, apparently, looks enough like a brain to calibrate the machine.

It turns out the hospital just takes a random resident, puts them in the MRI, and takes MRIs of their joints. I'm assuming it's because the hospital doesn't want to pay $10k for a fancy fake knee.

So now I'm curious, if the radiologists and radiology-adjacent folks are out there, how many different phantoms do your teams own?

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Blood Collection Tubes - Why all the colors?
  • Answers to questions I didn't know I had, thank you! I have to read technical documents with these designations all the time, so this was helpful.

    It also helps me understand why the lab techs are frustrated when they don't have certain vials on site, I assumed they were all basically the same and the colored tops just helped the team stay organized.

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  • Agreed, seems like a no-brainer. Typically this stuff is handled at an institutional level, with bad professors losing/ failing to achieve tenure. But some results have much bigger implications than just "Uh oh, I cited that paper and it was a bad one." Often, entire clinical pipelines are developed off of bad research, which wastes millions of dollars.

    See also, the recent scandals in Alzheimer's research. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease

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  • Touche, forgot this was PatientGamers. Grim Dawn is basically the same sans MMO. It's the best ARPG I've played like, ever, and it's due for a huge DLC soon. Goes on sale for very cheap often.

    Unlike Last Epoch, it's more item-focused. Unlike PoE, the items aren't a total nightmare to optimize...

  • A Double-crested Cormorant enjoys the sunrise over Lake Ossipee, NH, USA

    !

    Taken through the lens of my very basic binoculars with my mediocre phone camera.

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    Does your company do phishing simulations?
  • I'm 100% so far at my job, but we had one test that tricked somewhere around 30% of employees. They spoofed everyone's supervisor and made it look like an urgent Teams message was pending.

    Usually, if you get phished you lose your bonus. They made an exception that one time.

  • What is the largest file transfer you have ever done?
  • In grad school I worked with MRI data (hence the username). I had to upload ~500GB to our supercomputing cluster. Somewhere around 100,000 MRI images, and wrote 20 or so different machine learning algorithms to process them. All said and done, I ended up with about 2.5TB on the supercomputer. About 500MB ended up being useful and made it into my thesis.

    Don't stay in school, kids.

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  • Outer Wilds was the best game I played on PS4. I strongly recommend experiencing it for yourself.

    I would say the space ship/0g flight is maybe 30% of the gameplay, and you don't need to be really excellent at it, thankfully.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)NE
    Neuromancer49 @midwest.social
    Posts 3
    Comments 58