Dirty Minded

So I just went to my friend Hai's thesis defense. He's an MD-PhD doing medical engineering, and his research has been on brain imaging during neurosurgery. So, say you have a brain tumor. The docs'd take an MRI image of your brain to use for guiding the surgeon. The problem is, once you pop open the old brain pan, stuff starts moving around. Brain tissue is very soft and floats around in a bath of cerebrospinal fluid. (God, brain words are cool. "cerebrospinal") Once the skull is open, the tissue can swell, CSF can slosh out, and that's before the surgeon even starts poking around. So these engineers like Hai try to come up with ways to model the movement and deformation of the brain tissue so the surgeon can keep tabs on where the tumor's going with all that movement.

Anyway, I bring it up because it turns out they rely on existing models of soil movement to model the brain movement. Soil movement. You know soil: some solid stuff, some liquid stuff, oozing and drifting around under pressure. Just like brains. Who knew?


In unrelated news, Leanne is arriving tonight for a little New Hampsha visit and I've gotta go get ready, so I don't even have time to tell you about my trip to New York last weekend. Brief preview: still crowded, still expensive, traffic still shitty.

Have a good holiday weekend, y'all.