FIBRE – Best Practices, Quickly

Sound and noise isolation

Are you using sound in your experiment (other than giving instructions)?

  • No: Just use normal earplugs and, if you like, add the earmuffs.  Don’t use the in-ear audio systems
  • Yes, but basic is fine: Use the Siemens in-ear system
  • Yes, I need the best: Use the MR Confon with the earmuffs

Are you using the MR Confon in-ear system?

Tip: Use a pair of scissors and trim the little red air tubes in the earplugs down.  Look at the left vs. right earplug here:

Are you using the white Siemens headphones?

These guys:

As yourself why you’re using them.  Odds are you shouldn’t be.

Coil

Does the person fit in the 32-channel coil?

  • Yes: Use it.  It’s got the best brain SNR
  • Yes, but I need the neck: Use the 64-channel coil
  • No: Use the 20-channel coil.  It still works very well and is a good bit larger.

Patient comfort

Typically, you’ll set the 32-channel head coil’s padding up like this.  Note, the thicker pad is shown here (thicker and with neck support), but many will fit better using the thin pad.

We have various pad options to work with shown here.  The far-right pad will be used a lot.  It’s the “thin” pad that many people find works best in the head coil (the odd star-shape lets it wrap around the curve of the coil.

 

The blue pads are memory foam and the large one can be used to wrap around the entire back and sides of the head giving both padding behind the head and stabilization.  It also affords some extra sound protection.  The gray pads in the back can work well for neck support.  Note, we have thin gray rectangular pads that do very well placed under the participant’s elbows as well.

Data transfer

Do you like having a no-cost backup of your raw data here at FIBRE?

  • Yes: Use the Export to Offline option and send to our NAS
  • No: Transfer directly to a PACS server if you like, but you don’t get any extra data protection.

How should I transfer my data off the scanner?

  • Open the Patient Browser
  • Select your patient (not just one scan)
  • Pull down Transfer, Export to Off-line
  • Select FIBRE-Data
  • Append a name after “upload” (here, it’s Stark_Dec15_127603) and hit OK

How should I get my data off the NAS?

  • Slightly geeky: Use sshfs and make the FIBRE NAS a folder on your computer.  Copy via dragging or command-line just as you would from anything else.
  • Super-simple: Use the web interface.