The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Where can you meet a professor who figured out how to use 2 Mac optical mice and a ping-pong ball to record and measure the direction and velocity of insects as they respond, and don’t respond, to sounds?

From Monday morning October 16 through Wednesday evening October 18, I attended Neuroscience 2006 at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta, GA. I stayed nights with my friend from college, a doctor living in Rome, GA, and his beautiful family, which was great, except for the traffic, blech!, which trapped me in the car for 4 hours each day.

With 6x 30-inch displays attached to 6x MacPro Towers, and 2 of the new 24 inch iMacs, Apple was well-represented there, with no fewer than 8 team members demonstrating 6 solid solutions, including:

• NeuroLens : open source software designed (using Xcode) to assist in functional MRI analysis. Very cool stuff, allows researchers to place a 2 or 3D high resolution (”structural”) image of a person’s brain next to low resolution (”functional”) images of the same person’s brain reacting to stimuli, and accurately overlay the animated functional images over the structural image. From there, there are all sorts of image analysis tools that make work easier for neuro-workers.

• Volocity : commercial software designed for confocal microscopy. Remember the last time you looked in a microscope? As you change the focus, you see different layers… well, Volocity takes the pictures of different layers obtained from a microscope and interprets them in 3 dimensions. The Z axis resolution is dependent on the number of layers you make, in other words, how small the changes in focus are you make between each picture. The resulting pictures are amazing, as is the manipulation you can perform on them, and the further analysis. Not cheap, but also not to be missed by anyone with a serious need for confocal microscopy (I’m still having trouble pronouncing that).

• The Bio Team : was there represented by Stan the Cluster Man (my nickname for him, not on his card, yet). He had a cluster of 4 Xserves and an Xserve RAID there, was talking about his excellent INquiry software for getting clusters up and running. Of course, the most common question was “are those the new Intel Xserves?” The answer was sadly not… still waiting for those to ship, still expecting them later this month.

• Atamai was demonstrating their Epilepsy Viewer. This is software that allows a neurologist to see an accurate representation of a patient’s brain in 3 dimensions on the computer screen, for planning Epilepsy surgery. They had a neat gizmo, a stereoscopic camera to track a wand’s movement, so that as you pointed to say, someone’s head with the wand, on the computer screen, you could see a virtual wand pointing to an image of the person’s brain.

• OsiriX : a free, open source, dicom viewer for the Mac. This application takes the 2-d images generated by traditional CT scans of parts of the body, and renders them in colorful 3-D. By holding down the option key, clicking and dragging, clinicians can strip away layers below the skin revealing muscle and vessels, then rotate the image for optimal viewing. Sample image sets are included, not just for neuro-heads, but also for anyone that wants to test their new Intel Mac, this is a fun program!

Other solutions demonstrated included Calgary Scientific’s impressive ResolutionMD™ program, enabling real-time, 3-D viewing of complex medical data. The samples were, of course, of the brain, provided a fascinating view into a patient’s head, where one could literally see the aneurism from which he was suffering from any imaginable angle, and even travel inside the injury to, for example, measure its dimensions.

Among the 25,000 or so attendees, I met a writer, David Dobbs , who introduced me to what appears to be a very fine Mac note-taking, connection-making and brain-storming tool called DevonTHINK . He says he finds it indispensable while writing for finding sometimes unexpected references to articles he may have written or interviews he may have performed, about which he may have even forgotten.

I also bumped into a professor who explained his methodology for accurately recording and measuring the movements of his insect subjects (they really are insects, he doesn’t just treat them that way). Here’s what I understood:

1. He has taken two Apple optical mice, plugged them into one computer, and aligned them perpendicularly to each other on their sides so that their lasers cross at a 90 degree angle.
2. Adding a ping-pong ball or other light ball at the intersection of the mouses’ laser beams, he floats the ball on a calibrated air jet to suspend it in mid-air, with the beams hitting the center of the ball on its, yes!, X and Y coordinates.
3. The last ingredient, he drops his insect subject onto the floating ball.

As the insect moves on the ball, perhaps responding to light and sound generated by an experiment, the ball rotates beneath the bug, accurately mapping the bug’s progress across a virtual landscape recorded by a simple drawing program on the computer. Genius!

Interested in finding out more about scientific software on the Mac, and how Apple technology is driving scientific research? Visit http://www.apple.com/science . Also, here’s a link to Apple science software downloads .

Apple is also planning to have a material presence at RSNA 2006 in Chicago, November 26th-Dec 1 at McCormick Place. See you there!

[Update: Here’s a link to that, promised and delivered blog entry: Apple at RSNA 2006. ]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 10:26 pm and is filed under OS X, Review, Science, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.