Jiggling and scanning the brains of cadavers

How does one compare what doesn’t happen in the jiggled brains of dead persons with what does happen in the jiggling brains of living persons? This study is an attempt to answer that question:

“SimPACE: Generating simulated motion corrupted BOLD data with synthetic-navigated acquisition for the development and evaluation of SLOMOCO: A new, highly effective slicewise motion correction,” Erik B. Beall [pictured here] and Mark J. Lowe, NeuroImage, epub 2014. The authors at the Cleveland Clinic, making heavy use of acronyms, explain:

“In this study, we acquired BOLD-weighted data obtained with a motion-injection pulse sequence (described in the Appendix A: SimPACE) in cadavers and living subjects and compared the truemotion with the efficacy of several motion characterization metrics.”

Here’s further detail from the study:

The Neuroskeptic blog offers some thoughts, by a living person, about this. Neuroskeptic makes mention of, among other things, the famous dead-salmon brain-scan study that earned the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for neuroscience.