> How can 14 million pixels be 64 million times more pixels?
It’s Voxels not pixels. Voxels are 3D objects so to be clear this particular advancement isn’t 64 million (roughly 400 in each linear dimension^3) times better than the best that came before. Think 400x400 = 160,000 more pixels and 400 times as many slices.
Also the comparison is to a “typical clinical MRI for humans” which not only have 10 billion neurons but also tend to have relatively few slices. There’s little point in having people spend hours in a machine if a faster scan with fewer slices is good enough.
To be clear I used the term "pixels" in describing the characteristics of the final images produced, which are a series of stacked 2D images comprised of pixels.
But, I don't think it matters what we label the units we're counting, as long as we count them accurately.
The paper you've referenced states:
> field-of-view = 12 × 12 × 24 mm and matrix size = 200 × 200 × 400 giving an image with (60μm)[cubed] isotropic voxels
The "64 million times better" article states a resolution of 5μm voxels (for one aspect of the imaging). The paper the article references, by contrast, states 15μm when specifically comparing to MRI, and claims 1,000x improvement.
Diambiguating what is meant by "resolution" is a common problem, as it can refer to either the length of the axes or the overall area when multiplying them.
Conservatively, I'm going with 12x better resolution with the new technique when comparing apples to apples, or, to hype it reasonably: 5 cubed vs 60 cubed = a difference of 1,728 times more voxels in the same given area.
It’s Voxels not pixels. Voxels are 3D objects so to be clear this particular advancement isn’t 64 million (roughly 400 in each linear dimension^3) times better than the best that came before. Think 400x400 = 160,000 more pixels and 400 times as many slices.
Also the comparison is to a “typical clinical MRI for humans” which not only have 10 billion neurons but also tend to have relatively few slices. There’s little point in having people spend hours in a machine if a faster scan with fewer slices is good enough.
Anyway, while the point of comparison is suspect this is still a major improvement over earlier methods just look at the by comparison low resolution images in this paper from 2005. https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/15/5/639/442213?logi...