I told you it was an assignment, and what kind of Astronomy lecturer know a thing about MRI and how it works? Well I must have used some kind of Physics book as the source, since I remember that the symbol gamma was all over the place (can be RF photon actually). It was somekind of "Physics and its real world application" assignment thingie, I got MRI, a friend got echo explosion to determine the material of a piece of land, and other funny stuffs never mentioned anymore.
The most interesting development in the MRI field now, I think, is how they can now use the diffusal tensor imaging, being used in the Human Connectome Project. Might perhaps lead us to the first real scientific attempt to explain psychology.
Diffusion Tensor Imaging
---------- Post added at 07:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:35 PM ----------
I know there is no real information about microgravity effects on a human body on a really long terms like some tens of years, but what can be expected, especially if natural ageing is taken into account? Let's say we have a male human in the age of sixty on a LEO station. He spent last thirty years on that station without decsending back on Earth and not being affected by any decent acceleration at all. What should we expect from his health state to be? Is it possible to get him back on Earth alive using modern technologies? I expect him to die because of G-load during deceleration, but I might be wrong. Has he any chances at all?
It is dangerous for anyone that age to travel with any kind of means of transportation, especially after such a long time in weightlessness. Let's add up all the attributes of long-exposure of microgravity, atrophy of the muscles, osteoporosis, and multiply it by 30 (the most a person was in space is about more than a year), and you're gonna have a lot of problems. Yes, at some point the atrophy would stop, to the minimum muscle mass required to breathe and function in weightlessness, the osteoporosis too will stop at that stage, but we don't know what the stage is. It can be below what is needed to breathe and function on 1G, let alone to cope with the high-G manoeuvre that is re-entry. Now factor in his old age, what kind of organs will likely fail him? At 60 I have my bet on the heart, the liver, the kidney, the whole vascular system, and the brain would all in failing function, and the shock of the G-force itself can induce a heart attack or a stroke for this kind of individual without factoring in all the atrophy and osteoporosis resulted from the being in space for such a long time. A sternal or rib cage fracture would be in order at that scenario, which can lead to tamponade and worse, lung and heart damage, the chance of this guy surviving such a ride is pretty slim according to me, but unfortunately we will never have the data to test this hypotheses, since a. it is unethical to actually test this on a person, and b. not that many elderly climb up to roller coaster to provide us a comparison data, let alone the Stephen Hawking type of elder (not the brain, the whole ALS and bone reduction part). But then again a roller-coaster wouldn't compare to the G-force produced by spacecraft, so we may never now in all actuality in this case, I can only infer it from our current knowledge.
As a physician, I would rather keep him in orbit until he expires due to old age, since he might be able to function better and longer than his counterpart at the surface. Do you know? For the elderly, even the capability of being able take his own meal and drink is significantly related to his longetivity, since that reduces the stress-factor which for young people can be bad enough, and can have real physiologic effect to the elderly because of their reduced organ functionality. And perhaps the clean and controlled environment of a Space Station might have less toxins and the like which can improve upon the activity of the liver and kidney, another bonus point for the longetivity scoreboard. IDK for sure, we may need to bring mice for years on end up there to compare their age with the one down here, and we might get some data to play at.
