Just as a general note, these images contain personally identifying information about the patient. This includes not just the patient's name, but also his age, address, phone number, and an extremely limited health history.
There are many anonymized datasets available on Radiopaedia. http://radiopaedia.org/ I've spent quite a bit of time studying neurological conditions on that site and on wikipedia. Those are more useful, but anonymized. I'm not sure that there are many healthy MRI datasets available there, which makes it more difficult to statistically model MRI data.
I'm hoping to use Nipy and Dipy to create visualizations of my brain. In particular, i'm hoping to recreate some of the Diffusion Tensor Imaging work in this talk by Ariel Rokem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdrSZtB0uX0. However, i'm not sure if my DT images are high enough resolution.
I also did it for philosophical reasons. I believe that all digitized information past and present will be inevitably become known & public post facto. It's the nature of information & knowledge in our technological world to distribute itself until the world converges on total information omnipresence. So if, in the end, all [digitized] information is known, then there is no point in hiding information. This is more of a philosophical viewpoint though. obviously it's impossible for all information to converge in this way.
But this is true even of our own minds. And if our mind can be digitized from our brain, this also has interesting security implications. If you've seen the show stitchers, then you know what i mean.
Under no circumstances was this done in the name of art.
Out of curiosity, why point this out? It's obvious that you didn't do it for a number of reasons. Hundreds, in fact. So why art?
I also did it for philosophical reasons. I believe that all digitized information past and present will be inevitably become known & public post facto. It's the nature of information & knowledge in our technological world to distribute itself until the world converges on total information omnipresence. So if, in the end, all [digitized] information is known, then there is no point in hiding information. This is more of a philosophical viewpoint though. obviously it's impossible for all information to converge in this way.
This would be the end of freedom. I'll go into the reasons if needed, but the discussion has happened a few times before. Suffice to say, if you're not allowed to have privacy, then you're not allowed to be free.
Deeper freedom (that is, infinite potential) is inherent to being itself, but if what you're looking for is something more like diversity or novelty, then yes, that's contingent on perceptual subject-object duality.
What strength MRI was used for the scans? 1.5T, 3T, 7T?
[1] github.com/timpx/scripts [2] github.com/the-virtual-brain/tvb-library
e.g. the Human Connectome Project is still working on capturing the macroscale connectome, that is, high level structures only. Recording the microscale connectome, that is, the neuronal structure, currently requires destroying the brain you're analysing.
Brain upload is a sci-fi invention; using a T1, DWI, fMRI, EEG and behavioral data to build a realistic model of a subject's brain is today's neuroscience.
I will echo this point. I don't think I've met anyone in the field of neuroimaging who sees mind uploading as plausible. There's simply too much noise in the data for that sort of thing. Even simplified simulations such as the Human Brain Project require so much computing power that modeling a single mind is prohibitive; I can't imagine trying to perform whole-brain emulation accurately and practically without incurring more cost than it's worth. Wetware is good enough for me.
This step from (1) to (2) is a common assumption that most people are unwilling to reconsider, but it's equally possible to reject bottom-up modeling and ask what are the high-level constraints on brain activity that shape and direct it. This is what we do with the data I mentioned (T1, EEG, etc).
But you want the dendrites, too, not just cells.
The Distaster Recovery/Backup&Restore industry would probably disagree with you.
Almost all information, especially personally identifiable information has a temporal component to it.
For example, that record you posted opens the door for someone to find your (dcunit3d's) current address.
If you recently pissed someone off on the internet (even under a different username), knowing your current address would enable that someone to send a litany of irritating, potentially damaging stuff your way.
On the other hand, if one of your records from five years ago ends up public, the address listed on that record is most likely not where you are living now so it is of little immediate use to a would be attacker.
Another fairly well know example is the AshleyMadison hack. In that case, the recency of a given user's record on the site made the difference in whether the hackers were able to successfully extort money from the victim.
Anyways....
Wait, what?
I'm pretty sure that's not how computers (quantum or not) work.
Humble neuroinformatics lab knave here. While it's nice that you've made your data available, you might want to reconsider including the PHI. Many researchers are not interested in your phone number / where you live past the recruitment stage, and even then that information is kept confidential in accordance with IRB policies and HIPAA. The only data that a researcher might want to know is whether there are any phenotypes associated with your data (e.g., autism, ADHD, other stable traits, etc) or, in the case of task-related data, when certain blocks or events started/stopped and for how long. Even with phenotyping data, we are very cautious about how we go about sharing since we don't want to violate anyone's privacy (see here: http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/enhanced/sharing.ht...). This is very important for individuals with conditions that are stigmatized in society- we don't want to make someone's life worse by outing them as being autistic, bipolar or depressed for instance.
In light of what I've said above, I will also express my disagreement with your philosophy. I do not believe that is natural for information to converge to a single point- in fact, many corporations rely on information asymmetries to gain an upper-hand in the market. The internet may reduce such information asymmetry, but it is unlikely that it will eliminate it completely (unless humanity turns into the Borg and creates a hive mind). Indeed so long as human thought is decentralized with separate minds in separate bodies, information asymmetry will remain the default.
Moving along, I want to note that a chief goal of science is to seek truths that are generalizable to the population at large. A single DTI series isn't really useful for achieving that goal since you can't determine how it relates to scans from a number of other participants(i.e., a 1st-level analysis is not a 2nd-level analysis; a case study is not a wider truth about cognition). In that sense, it might be better to see if there is a databank willing to accept your scan and donate your data to that so that you could be part of a broader sample.
More pragmatically, you might also want to consider using the NifTI format for your data, since this is the format that researchers use when processing data in various neuroimaging suites (i.e., Freesurfer, AFNI, SPM, FSL, etc). You may also want to consider organizing your data according to the Brain Imaging Data Structure standard, as many datasets are moving towards this (http://bids.neuroimaging.io/) and software tools are being written to take advantage of this structure.
Finally:
Under no circumstances was this done in the name of art.
That doesn’t mean that it can’t contribute to art (:P)- http://www.neurobureau.org/galleries/brain-art-competition-2...
It's too bad we don't have a universal way of sanitizing all meta data from JPEGs, PDFs, Word files, and everything else at the click of a button. Something that's really simple and quick to use.
I'm aware that there are lots of separate little tools and hacks to deal with sanitizing or anonymizing, but I wish there were either a standalone tool that dealt with every kind of common file, or a "Sanitize" button that was a standard feature in every viewer, editor, or browser (when uploading for example).
i was aware of the privacy implications. i briefly looked at the data in osirix that i would be exposing and decided that it was worth it.