In Memoriam: David Chesler

I wanted to share the sad news that our dear colleague David Chesler passed away recently.

I suspect all of you know the name, through the library at the Center named in his honor, but not all of you had the opportunity to know the man. David was a remarkable person, intellectually without peer but paired with a quiet, gentle and generous soul, and for those that knew him he was a true friend.

David made many seminal contributions to our ability to interpret and understand medical imaging data. Perhaps most famously, he developed the concepts and tools for image reconstructions from projections for the earliest PET scanners developed here at the MGH by Gordon Brownell, independent of and contemporaneous with similar work by Cormack for computed tomography. The rapid clinical adoption of CT scanning put the work of Cormack with Hounsfield in the spotlight, for which they both won the Nobel Prize in 1979, but it’s completely fair to say that David’s contribution was equally inventive and ultimately impactful in understanding the fundamentals of cross sectional image reconstruction across imaging domains. You could also say he was robbed!

His contributions to the work here at the MGH, first in PET and x-ray imaging, and later in MRI, were many, including work on the earliest digital X-ray systems, dynamic MR imaging (leading to our Center’s efforts in functional imaging), flow imaging with and without contrast agents, reconstruction of so-called “zero TE” images, and many others. For the many years he worked here at the MGH, if you had a hard problem requiring deep mathematical insights, you brought it to David – if you were patient (you could see his mind at work as he stared off thinking), you would get an answer, or the key question asking for the piece of the puzzle you forgot or didn’t even know to give.

I got to know David during my earliest days as a graduate student – before working at what was then the MGH NMR Center (the precursor to today’s Martinos Center), I worked with a cardiologist on a digital x-ray project, and David was my mentor in thinking through what the ultimate capabilities of that new instrument were. When with his help we came to understand the fundamental limitations of that early instrument, I cast around for a more promising project to work on. The NMR Center at that time was directed by that very same cardiologist who I was working with on the x-ray project, and I remember asking if perhaps pivoting to the NMR Center might be more fruitful – the answer was “keep at the X-ray project!”

But not being one to take no for an answer, I found a radiologist working within the NMR Center willing to take me on to work with him – I thought this is great. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the Center director wasn’t so happy with my end run (being completely naive to the politics between cardiology and radiology at the time in running the Center making matters even worse that simply ignoring his advice), and at a time when working at the NMR Center required their leadership group’s approval for entry, I was not spoken of highly by the director when my name came up for discussion.

That should have been the end of my career in MRI, and perhaps at the MGH! But David, in his soft spoken but clear headed manner, I learned spoke up in my favor against the clear wishes of his own boss, and somehow saved the day for me, getting me through the door (even if the back door!) and into the NMR Center. For a young student, it was to be life changing, and an act of kindness and I now understand (though didn’t then) real courage that is remembered these many years later.

I’ll share one other story here to highlight another facet of David. A few years ago, long after he retired, we were meeting in a social setting when he came up to my wife and me and announced to us with some clear pride that he had slept together with someone new for the first time since his wife had passed away several years back – my wife and I fidgeted a bit uncomfortably, not quite knowing how to respond to this, and he clearly enjoyed the awkward silence – then told us he just brought a new dog home! You didn’t always see it, but he was a clever and funny guy behind that quiet demeanor. 

Those that knew him as a colleague and friend will miss him, but all of us continue to value the insights and contributions that he made to our Center, our department, and the entire medical imaging community.