Why brain extraction is not as bad as it sounds

Scientists marvel at how other scientists – the ones who study something other than what they themselves study – give strange meanings to common words.

Evan Shellshear, at Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre in Gothenburg, sent me an example, a study called Fast Robust Automated Brain Extraction.

Shellshear said: “I stumbled across this article somehow [whilst] looking for optimal code to quickly compute the distance between two triangles in three-dimension space for computer games. It sounds almost like something out of a game itself … After careful reading, [the paper] justifies the initially shocking title.”

The author is Stephen M Smith [pictured here] who, back in 2002 when the paper came out, was at the Department of Clinical Neurology at Oxford University’s John Radcliffe Hospital, and is now a professor of biomedical engineering.

Certain details might give you the willies,…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian