Stanford Mini Med School

I have recently come across these videos from Stanford medical school, where an introduction about several topics of health and research are talked about. The list of videos can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/course?list=ECD7B0DBD8C28BDEA2 

I post here the one about medical imaging:

Simulation for Nuclear Medicine

Simulation is a very important tool in medical imaging, as I already wrote in a previous post. In nuclear medicine, Monte-Carlo simulation is the most used method to simulate data. There  are  several  Monte-Carlo packages, which vary in precision and accuracy of  the simulated effects and computational demand.  Some research groups devised their own Monte-Carlo computer codes, built on top of a general-purpose code, which serves as core layer and application-specific modules are constructed in a hierarchical layer architecture.

PET-EGS based on EGS4 (Electron Gamma Shower 4) http://irs.inms.nrc.ca/research/imaging/
GATE (Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission) http://www.opengatecollaboration.org/

Dedicated packages that have supported PET and/or SPECT research are:
SimSET (Simulation System for Emission Tomography)http://depts.washington.edu/simset/html/user_guide/user_guide_index.html
SORTEO (Simulation Of Realistic Tridimensional Emitting Objects) http://sorteo.cermep.fr/
PeneloPET (PENetration and Energy LOss of PET) http://nuclear.fis.ucm.es/penelopet/

GATE is one of the most famous packages and the paper published by the authors is here:
http://iopscience.iop.org/0031-9155/49/19/007/

Do you recommend other packages?

Teaching MRI

Teaching MRI is a hard task, specially if the students don't have a strong physics background. Three of my favorite resources (and free) to use in classes are:

MRI online course: http://www.imaios.com/en/e-Courses/e-MRI
This online course has great animations to explain concepts and brief explanations. I think some of the animations are very helpful to explain details to students. You have to create an account to see the animations properly, but this requires little effort. 

Virtual MRI (VMRI): http://www.iftm.de/elearning/vmri/idx_vmri.htm
This program can be easily run in your computer and gives a good idea about parameters for several sequences (Spin-Echo, Gradient-Echo, Inversion Recovery, Fast Spin-Echo), such as TR, TE, TI and ETL. Furthermore, it shows the k-space of the images and allows us to manipulate it and see the effect. Other image quality parameters can also be changed: FOV, pixel size, ... I strongly recommend this for computer classes where students have to apply their knowledge.

OSIRIX DICOM database: http://www.osirix-viewer.com/datasets/
This database contains several MRI datasets acquired for different regions (with and without pathology) and with different sequences. I usually don't use OSIRIX, because I don't have MacOS... I use one of the free visualization programs I referred in this post.