Today was an interesting day: I spent most of it at Kennedy Krieger hospital in Baltimore chatting with MRI technicians. I observed a research project involving MRI scans of the brain of a healthy young woman. I then had a chance to view for myself the files that MRIs created.
.REC files are compressed graphic-and-data files that you can't open in multipurpose software, but a fellow called Chris Rorden created a handy analytical program called MRICro that does the job nicely. I can't pretend to understand a lot about brain function and how MRICro's tools help analyze it, but I did take advantage of its ability to export scans to a series of JPEG files.
I then slapped the JPEGs into Windows Live Movie Maker and turned an hour's work into a sub-2-minute video. There are 271 frames in this video, representing three different MRI points of view.
Sequence 1 is from the side. Sequences 2 and 3 are from the top. Sequence 4 is the longest and most interesting: It's from the front, and you can see the tip of the nose emerge, followed by all the inner workings of the skull, out through to the back of the head.
