Last year I did a co-op placement working on some medical imaging software. Looking back, I definitely needed more C++ knowledge, but I ended up walking away with from the job with many crucial linux development, programming, and pasta boiling skills.

Wait, pasta boiling?

You heard me correctly. Here's a short video of some zitoni we imaged in real-time using the software I was working on. Note that the quality is butchered because it was originally captured in an unusual resolution.

You can see me frantically moving the slice plane and rotating this view in 3D. This branching pasta creation was made to to be similar to the branching vasculature found in the body so we could easily test our software and catheter tracking.

I made this fantastic creation by first obtaining zitoni, a long tubular pasta, from Masellis Supermarket in Toronto (it's a great Italian market). Then I boiled the pasta until al dente in water and Gadovist, which is a commonly used contrast agent for MRI. I carefully sliced holes and wrapped the pasta joints in Saran Wrap. I then suspended the pasta abomination in Agar. All credit goes to my graduate student supervisor Kevan Anderson who came up with the idea.

Near the end of the video, in the cross sectional slice of the pasta tube, you can see some horrible black mess within the pasta. That's an air bubble due to my sloppy joint wrapping. It shows up as black, an area of zero signal, because air has no magnetic properties. 

In the making of the pasta phantom I used enough contrast agent to make the pasta appear gray under MR, but what if I wanted more precision to have the pasta appear identical to human tissue? 

New research in Nature last week outlined the fabrication of magnetic particles for use as contrast agents in MRI. By engineering your own magnetic particles you could tailor their characteristic spectral signals to show up exactly how you'd like them to. The precise control of contrast with magnetic particles has great implications in imaging from cell tracking, to micro fluidics, to realistic pasta arteries.