you're it

busy day today, so i'm just gonna post a link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/health/policy/30nih.html

it's an article on dr. elias zerhouni, director of the NIH and former mentor to my former mentor at hopkins. he's a radiologist by training, and one of his innovations was a technology known as MRI tagging. MRI images can be taken and compiled much like frames in a video or movie. as a result, MRI videos show high-resolution movement of, say, a beating heart. tagging MRI means to impose a magnetic "grid" on the images, which acts as if it were embedded in the tissue itself. the grid then moves along with the heart, bending and warping accordingly. a computer precisely measures the movement of the grid. this allows for quantification of heart movement, which is useful in determining what parts of a heart have died or lost function after a heart attack, for example.