A gif of my brain (MRI scans)

http://www.gfycat.com/BetterPhysicalIvorybilledwoodpecker

(License: Public Domain, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

I participated in a research study last night and got a CD with 40 MB of scans of my brain. Yay!

I didn’t have a fancy DICOM viewer like OSIRIx, which lets you fly through the brain in any direction you want by reconstructing the data appropriately from the MRI slices, but I was able to make the above gif using just two lines on the command-line in linux.

How I made the gif

Then, upload to gfycat.

Other viewers

Mango

A DICOM viewer (kind of clunky / not well integrated into Ubuntu):

DICOM Web Viewer

A browser-based DICOM viewer that is somehow better integrated into linux:

https://github.com/ivmartel/dwv

To use, download and unzip, go to the folder for the viewer you want, and open up “index.html”. For instance:

file:///home/nrw/Pictures/ivmartel-dwv-2b340ec/viewers/static/index.html

Then click “file” and select all the files you want to open.

Scaling Gfycats (in embedded iframes)

The gfycat was pretty small, so I wanted to embed a scaled-up version here. Doing so took me a few minutes to figure out, so here it is. After getting the iframe code from gfycat.com, I manually set the width and height to be 2x, then set scale to be 2  and added scaling for firefox.

However, my image was now scaling off the page! From stackoverflow I figured out that I need to add “transform-origin” attributes in there. See below.

 <iframe width="512" height="512" style="-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; -webkit-transform: scale(2); -webkit-transform-origin: 0 0; -moz-transform-scale(2); -moz-transform-origin: 0 0;" src="http://gfycat.com/ifr/BetterPhysicalIvorybilledwoodpecker" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Update: 29 July 2015

I found a better viewer than mango and dwv. Slicer lets you see the brain scans from any angle (the defaut is top – side – back), and you can import ALL the DICOM files and it will sort out for you which ones belong to a “series” (hard to do in the native file manager since my file manager doesn’t show DICOM previews). See pictures below.

To get slicer, go to http://download.slicer.org/ and download the .tar.gz, then extract its contents. Go into the extracted root folder (something like “Slicer-4.4.0-linux-amd64”) and run the executable in the root folder.

Screenshot from 2015-07-28 19:46:04

Screenshot from 2015-07-29 04:43:05

youtube channels!

Lately I’ve been finding some awesome youtube channels with really well-done content to watch and learn about fields I don’t really know much about.

This is Alice and my attempt at the rainbow heart cookies… we tried ^^;

20150411_204027

I haven’t found a good one for sewing / cosplay / diy fashion / theater costumes / movie props / cosmetics stuff yet.

Anyway, the plan is, instead of going to film school, I’m going to watch youtube videos, buy a few books, and make tons and tons of crappy videos.  🙂

 

[edit 13 July 2015] Part II!

I decided to do a more comprehensive post, since why not, I’ve already got them in my bookmarks.

My giant playlist of nails / fashion / clothes manufacturing:

misc. updates: horrible epoxy rash, rudder, volvo ocean race, sewing machines

volvo ocean race updates twice a day on their youtube channel, & the short legs are pretty engaging, well, probably mostly team SCA is in the lead right now so I’m more interested than usually 🙂

~~RUDDER~~
re: rudder construction, have not had a chance to sit down & upload/document/write-up everything,

but in brief —

Solid bronze inside. We did CNC foam on a shopboat, laid down fiberglass, the rudder post & pre-stressed the trailing rods[1] , closed the mold and poured 2-part foam-it! 15lb urethane foam, de-molded, three more glass layers to connect the two halves, then gelcoat, install, and antifoul coat.

We also have a nice 3d model of outside of our rudder now (and a renewed complaint list against solidworks):
https://github.com/nouyang/scienceboat/blob/master/boatrudder.STL
& the mold:

https://github.com/nouyang/scienceboat/blob/master/rudder-mold-bottom.STL

[1]  (glassed some GPO3 blocks down, after tack/cure time we tightened some bronze nuts against the gpo3 blocks, checked that the rods were stressed by
i added two pictures to the end of the “rudder skeleton” album
https://picasaweb.google.com/113942194695013581888/SailBoatMay2015?authuser=0&feat=directlink

~~INSTALL~~

the details i left out are: we put so much “gelcoat” (just epoxy layers since our rudder is unlikely to be flexing a lot) on that it we lost clearance on the back edge (oops), so after installing we found it didn’t turn well put rather “popped” to rotate fully since it was catching where it rotated against the keel.

we sawed & scraped until we had clearance and now the rudder turns like a dream now (we can do a sweet 180 turn now) — it’s a little “less waterproof” on that backedge since we had to take off most of the gelcoat layers, but worst case seawater finds its way to the foam, which can sit in water for up to 2 yrs before deteriorating — realistically it has so much glass still that it should be fine.

~~EPOXY~~
also, my face/arms rash is still itchy 1 week from last exposure (which did not even involve mixing epoxy –I was just cleaning up). Do not f*** with mixed / uncured epoxy, folks, and also do NOT use acetone to wash epoxy off your skin.
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i’m using dipenhydramine (over-athe-counter skin numbing agent) & seeing a dr. on wed, but for the record:

5: Do not under any circumstances use acetone to clean up. This is the very quickest way to become sensitised. The acetone will immediately remove any natural protective oils in your skin and take anything it has dissolved, that is ANYTHING it has dissolved straight into your body. If you are going to use acetone to clean up your skin, you may as well just grab yourself a syringe and wack the crap up your arm and be done with it because it is much the same deal.

Inline image 1

~~singer sewing machine, 7442 disassembly / troubleshooting (bobbin did not wind, all lights blink & beeps) ~~

btw if you’re curious this is what the singer 7442 looks like inside when it’s operating, pretty interesting set of cams and mechanisms
https://youtu.be/RASgDLSg3Xw?t=24s

(pt 3 shows the “lights blinking” error https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4Cqt1lBxLY)

(pt 1 points out the things we fixed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T47fLW1PscE)