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.
For the record, i wanted to post my brain online for many reasons. First of all, I did it for science of course. It'd be great for more of this data to be available online for people to study and work with.
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.
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.
Freedom is vague, here, but I think what you want will still be possible (at least theoretically) given causality and physical distance.
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.
Causality and physics is also what makes GP's wish near-certainty given continuing technological progress. Hiding information is going to get only harder.
Thanks for posting your scans. As noted in the issue I just made (I am @maedoc on Github), if you add the diffusion imaging scans we can virtualize your brain [1] and simulate it [2].
What strength MRI was used for the scans? 1.5T, 3T, 7T?
I doubt the scans really high enough resolution for a meaningful simulation --- I don't believe MRI scans can capture the complete connectome of a single human brain, let alone any subcellular data.
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.
As the research engineer on the Virtual Brain simulator to which I linked, which we apply to improve e.g. epilepsy diagnosis, I can say that those scans do have enough resolution to capture global properties of anatomy and dynamics of brain networks.
Yes, but that's just large scale structures. This wouldn't be simulating any of the features which most people find interesting about brains, i.e. the personality. It's important to make that clear. This is not a brain upload.
Personality would be expressed as interperson variability in certain parameters or connectivity of the brain model. It's not at all mystical or hiding in the subcellular structure.
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.
You need at least 10 picometer percision to go down to the cell level (1.5L / 86 billion neurons), MRIs are 1mm according to the talk dcunit3d posted [0].
Yikes, please don't step anywhere near anyone else's medical data. That kind of "philosophy" is pretty much an imperative to violate patient and research subject privacy (and yes that is something to be protected).
You say there is no point in hiding information if it will be known eventually but "eventually" is a key point.
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.
Also, I wanted my brain to be online in a widely distributed, public manner. In case of robot apocalypse of course. Hopefully, a quantum computer in the future would have low-bandwidth write access to my brain in the past. Quantum mechanics. Then I would be one of the earliest widely-distributed, targetable maps of a human brain on the public internet. And the people of the future could avert a worldwide AI disaster by pinging memories directly into layers of my brain. A la Steins;Gate, if haven't seen it, you should.
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.
The original poster (being savvy enough to use GitHub, etc.) was probably aware of this but didn't think it was worth his time to carefully edit out that info.
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).
You can export anonymised files from Osirix very easily. You can also just anonymise the fields you want to easily. I'm yet to see a dicom viewer as good as Osirix - it's simple to use and has every feature I've ever wanted. How the paid viewers get it so wrong is beyond me.
it was in the name of science, of course! i'm pleasantly surprised to see some of the discussions on here, concerning copyright and health data ownership. =]
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.
I'm pretty sure that he's legally allowed to release his own PHI and PII. Since the README includes "I open sourced my brain. Here it is," it's from "dcunited001" and the scans are for David Conner, I'm pretty sure this is the person in question releasing his own information.
I don't think people are questioning the right for him to release his MRI scans. I think we are wondering if the patient is aware of how much of his private info is being released in the scan.
Most definitely. Using the pydicom library, you can view all of the metadata stored along with the images. For instance, the patient's telephone number is listed with a 540 area code.
I have not and will not peek at the DICOM, but anyone else thinking about doing something like this should heed the preceding comments and be aware that stripping PHI headers is critical to deidentifying medical imaging data. Also, the imaging data itself can also be identifying — best practice for sharing deidentified neuroimaging data involves face-stripping.
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.