During our time out in the Milwaukee-area we spent a fair amount of time talking about and looking at MR and specifically fMRI. I had heard of both and basically understood that fMRI allowed doctors and scientists to watch blood flow in the brain in real time. (I’ll do a post later that goes into the subject more deeply.)
Greene suggests that in some circumstances, real honesty is not about overcoming the temptation to lie but about not having to deal with that temptation in the first place. On an fMRI image, at least, the lying brain may look no different from one that’s simply contemplating whether to lie. “Within the dishonest group, we saw no basis for distinguishing lies from honest reports,” says Greene.
While we were seeing the MR equipment, we got a funny inight into what it’s like constantly being around big magnets. The MR team explained to us that whenever a group of people from the field get together, say for dinner, they all have to explain to the waitstaff that none of the magnetic strips on any of their credit cards work.
Okay, so maybe it’s not a joke, but I bet it would make a good cartoon for MR Monthly (if there is such a thing).
Oh, and when we were in the room we had to take everything out of our pockets that was either metal or could be erased. All our data stored in hard drives, credit cards, etc. seems to have made it out unscathed I’m happy to report.
While we were in Milwaukee we saw a sales presentation for a new MRI machine. Its a pretty funny thing, the marketing of MRI machines – the features are really esoteric, and you need a crane and a reinforced concrete floor to get it into it’s new home.
One of the features touted in a powerpoint we saw is that the new model MRI machine has 5,700 Henrys. At which point Adam the aerospace engineer said “holy crap”. Noah and I said “what’s a Henry?”
So we look it up and a Henry is this: Haha kidding. I don’t understand this equation. But I did some research!
In any situation involving electricity, there is a magnetic field generated by the electricity passing through a circuit, and the field causes a certain amount of interference with the passage of electricity, and the amount of magnetic interference is called inductance.
One unit of inductance is a Henry, and if you are trying to transmit electricity efficiently, you don’t want a lot of Henrys. However! If you are trying to make the mightiest magnets ever for your magnetic imaging device, you want all the Henrys you can get.
So basically, a Henry is more or less the “horsepower” of the MRI industry.
Looking at the medical records of more than 155,000 patients at nine physician practices and four community health centers in the hospital’s primary care network, they found that patients who not only named their own doctors but whose doctors also identified them as “my patient” were more likely to get screenings for cancer, diabetes, and coronary artery disease compared to patients not linked to a personal physician. These patients saw different doctors in a practice or health center.
Although the patient-physician connection was more common among people who are white, speak English, and have health insurance, the bond with a personal physician was a bigger factor than race or ethnicity in whether a patient got guideline-recommended preventive care. Being insured was also not as important as being connected, according to the study, which was completed before Massachusetts passed its healthcare law mandating near-universal coverage.
Found this video, which is a good explanation of how MRI works, notable also because its explained by
“Wizard of Schenectady” Howard Hart, who used to work for General Electric on MRI design, and the video is produced by the awesome Edison Museum in Schenectady
Anyone who’s had an MRI knows one thing: they are SO LOUD. Why is that ? Well we found out last week: basically an MRI is giant speaker!
The way an MRI works is by creating a super-powered electromagnet that resonates at specific frequencies.
The way a loudspeaker works is by applying an electric field to a coil in conjunction with a magnet that moves a cone (which produces the sound).
So in the case of an MRI, a byproduct of the really gigantic magnet used to analyze your internal organs is that at some frequencies the magnet is acting like the magnet in a loudspeaker, and the enclosure for the machine itself is acting like the speaker cone.
This isn’t intentional, just a byproduct of the basic technology, and GE actually puts in a bunch of sound insulation and uses other tricks (and recommends ear protection) to make it less loud.
To prove the point that its basically a big speaker, here is an audio-only youtube clip that is a song played by using an MRI machine:
It is on the sociological level, though, that we’re missing the boat most completely by sticking doggedly with a workplace-based system that no longer makes sense. America has always been a mobile society with a labor market that grows more fluid over time. Once, the norm was to work for a single employer for one’s entire career. Today, people change jobs an average of 11 times before they reach 40. Fear of losing health coverage keeps people in jobs they would otherwise leave, creating a drag on economic efficiency.
I hadn’t thought about how the trend of people being more transient in their jobs effects our healthcare policy, but it makes sense it should.
While we were out at Waukasha we spoke to David Lee again. One of the things he said that was very interesting is that one of the best predictors of a person’s health is the question “how are you feeling today?”
Track Your Happiness.org is a new scientific research project that aims to use modern technology to help answer this age-old question. Using this site in conjunction with your iPhone, you can systematically track your happiness and find out what factors – for you personally – are associated with greater happiness. Your responses, along with those from other users of trackyourhappiness.org, will also help us learn more about the causes and correlates of happiness.
This is super interesting to me and starts towards making health a better game, which we’ve been talking lots about.
Hi! This is a blog about a project we are doing for GE. We are from The Barbarian Group, an online marketing company, and GE hired us to help them with their internet behavior, so this is our marketing journal where we will show you what we find and talk about what we might do next.
Haha kidding. I don’t understand this equation. But I did some research! 