Dear AuntMinnie Member,
The Christmas spirit is real. That's according to Danish researchers, who used functional MRI (fMRI) to find scientific evidence for that warm, fuzzy feeling in those who celebrate the midwinter holiday.
The researchers divided healthy individuals into two separate groups, half who celebrated Christmas and half who didn't, and performed fMRI scans on both groups as they viewed images related to the holiday. Importantly, the researchers made sure neither eggnog nor gingerbread was consumed before the scans.
The fMRI scans detected areas of heightened brain activity in the Christmas-observant group -- activity not found in the non-Christmas group -- which perhaps could be interpreted as evidence of a biochemical basis for the holiday spirit. Get the rest of the details by clicking here, or visit our MRI Community at mri.auntminnie.com.
Healing sonographer back pain
Back down to earth, Doug Wuebben and Mark Roozen have returned with their latest installment on how to correct and prevent occupational injuries among sonographers.
In part 2 of their series on sonographer back pain, they talk about the causes of back pain and, as always, provide useful exercises that you can do to improve your posture and eliminate pain.
Read more by clicking here, or visit the Ultrasound Community at ultrasound.auntminnie.com.
CT motion correction
Finally, visit our Advanced Visualization Community for a new article on how researchers from California and Pennsylvania developed a method for dealing with artifacts caused by respiratory motion in scans of lung cancer patients. Learn more by clicking here, or go to av.auntminnie.com.
