Medical Imaging? who Me?

I have had several of my recent friends give me the skeptical eye and ask me "why are you taking that Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging course?"

The answer lies in my background (before I met most of you!), so let me tell you.

When I graduated from the University of Iowa, with a BS degree in computer science, Hewlett-Packard hired me right out of school, and I moved to the Bay Area.  I was an engineer, on embedded systems, making patches, analyzing system core dumps, organizing trade show exhibits, and teaching courses in operating system internals and driver writing. I was an operating system engineer, which included unix.  So in short terms, I programmed devices, including medical devices, and I understand at the root level how the MRI system is controlling all of the devices that capture the MRI image.  I have been involved with unix systems since 1989. Man, that makes me sound OLD! :-)

While in California, my Mom became chronically ill with a disease called COPD, and during that time I also had a child; my Mom was too sick to travel to California to visit us.  That, along with sitting in my car for 2 hours 1 way to work with an infant.... incented me to move back to Iowa and take a position as an engineer at MCI.

While at MCI, I programmed a network controller, an IVR, which provided phone services which included  1-800-Collect. I'm sure you have heard of that.  I was one of the lead architects of that system, which carried other traffic as well, 7 million calls per day in fact.  During my time at MCI, I had the opportunity to work on video compression and encoding technologies called H.323 and H.324, and working with IBM Research, built a prototype of a service very similar to what we now know as Skype.

I credit my Mom for all she did to help me in these endeavors, as I travelled ALOT back then, and my 2 girls loved to go to Gramma's house while I was away for work.  My Mom survived over 10 years with her COPD, and I think she did because she knew how important it was for her to take care of her favorite grandgirls.  My Mom died in 2006 at the age of 79 of COPD and lung cancer, and I really miss her.

My Mom, Liz and Tori, in 2005 before she died.

So, The fMRI course is particularly interesting to me, because I used to program devices, including medical devices, and work on video encoding and compression.   Reminds me of being 20 again I guess, and I think it's alot of fun!  :-)