Martinos researchers turned out in force at the ISMRM meeting this month in Cape Town, South Africa. With more than 100 abstracts presented by faculty, trainees, staff, and collaborators, they showcased the full span of the Martinos Center’s translational arc: from inventing MRI technologies and building new acquisition and reconstruction methods to applying the tools they have developed in a host of disease areas.
Several trends in Martinos research emerged during the meeting. Not least was the Center’s ongoing efforts to build better tools: the first step in the translational arc and a core component of research in the Center. This work showed up across the conference in multiple forms: new coil and gradient designs, a versatile acquisition platform, artificial intelligence as accelerant, and a parallel track of low-field portable scanner research.
Another of the trends on display was the Center’s push toward cellular-scale brain imaging. The earliest signs of disease in the brain often appear at the cellular level — long before symptoms emerge or conventional scans show anything unusual. Martinos researchers are developing MRI techniques sensitive enough to distinguish individual cell bodies from their wire-like extensions, effectively turning the scanner into a noninvasive microscope.
Martinos researchers have also been busy developing and applying new ways to explore fluid dynamics and the glymphatic system. The brain has its own waste-clearance system — a network of fluid channels that flushes out toxic proteins, most actively during sleep. Dysfunction in this system is increasingly implicated in Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, but it has been nearly impossible to observe noninvasively in living people. Across several presentations, Martinos researchers reported tremendous progress in revealing the brain’s “hidden plumbing.”
Active, deliberate clinical translation — moving methods developed on cutting-edge research hardware toward the standard clinical scanners where most patients are actually seen — was another recurring theme in presentations by Center researchers. The question driving much of the work described in the presentations was not just “can we measure this?” but “can we measure it in a way that changes how a patient is treated?” In presentations describing work with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), 7T magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), functional PET-MRI, and more, the researchers demonstrated the success they have had in pursuing this question.
A Record of Achievement
Martinos Center researchers received strong recognition at the 2026 ISMRM annual meeting, earning awards across multiple tiers of distinction. Eight researchers received Summa Cum Laude honors — among the conference’s highest individual paper recognitions — while seven earned Magna Cum Laude distinctions. Also, four abstracts were chosen for the AMPC (Annual Meeting Program Committee) selected oral presentation track, which highlights work judged to be among the most significant contributions of the meeting.
The breadth of the recognized work reflects the Center’s range across both methods development and clinical / scientific application. On the technical side, researchers were recognized for advances in diffusion MRI acquisition, CEST imaging, arterial spin labeling, vessel segmentation, echo-planar imaging, and parallel transmit coil design. On the application and neuroscience side, honored projects addressed Alzheimer’s disease, migraine, aging, REM sleep behavior disorder, white matter disease, and cerebrovascular hemodynamics — with several studies leveraging the Center’s 7T capabilities for spectroscopy, microstructural imaging, and high-resolution perfusion work.
Notably, at least two researchers received recognition at multiple award levels, and several of the honored abstracts represent collaborative or multi-investigator efforts, suggesting that the awards reflect not just individual achievement but a broader culture of methodological innovation tied to meaningful clinical and scientific questions.
Another member of the Martinos community was honored for his body of work in his career thus far. In a ceremony during the meeting, Berkin Bilgic was named an ISMRM Fellow. He received this honor in recognition of his work developing new acquisition and reconstruction methods that simultaneously exploit MR physics, signal processing, machine learning, and hardware abstractions for in vivo applications, primarily in neuroimaging.
