Last week the MGH Martinos Center dedicated its advanced magnetoencephalography (MEG) facility as the David Cohen MEG Laboratory. Cohen—the inventor of MEG, a leader in the field of biomagnetism for more than 50 years, and a Martinos Center faculty member who was instrumental in building and deve...
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A&E Series Highlights Imaging Study of Dissociative Identity Disorder Patient
The Martinos Center’s Robert Savoy is slated to appear in the final episode of the 6-part A&E series “The Many Sides of Jane” airing on the network tonight (Tuesday, February 19). The series follows Jane Hart, a 28-year-old mother of two with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formerly c...
It’s All about Teamwork: The Center’s Shahin Nasr on his breakthrough findings in the visual system
A research team at the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging has shed new light on the fine-scale organization of human visual cortex. Scientists have long sought deeper understandings of how different visual features (e.g., color, motion and depth) were encoded within the visual system, bu...
The Secret Lives of Martinos Folk: Carol Barnstead and the Center’s cast of colorful characters
I have this theory that you need to be a character to work at the Martinos Center; you have to be a bit of an oddball, albeit in a fun, quirky kind of way. I’m not sure whether this is a prerequisite enforced during one of the hiring steps or is simply the result of some kind of self-selection pr...
AMA @ Martinos: Anastasia Yendiki
The 2022 meeting of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), to be held June 19-22 in Glasgow, Scotland, will feature keynote lectures by no fewer than two Martinos Center researchers: Anastasia Yendiki and Jon Polimeni. In anticipation of the meeting, we approached Anastasia about putting...
Ken Kwong and the Introduction of Noninvasive fMRI
In the early months of 1992 the neuroscience community was flush with excitement. Jack Belliveau, a graduate student with the MGH-NMR Center (now the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging), had recently published in Science his pioneering work with functional MRI, and the possibilities of th...
Martinos Collaborators and Alum Receive 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience
Congratulations to Nancy Kanwisher, PhD, Winrich Freiwald, PhD, and Doris Ying Tsao, PhD, on their receipt of the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience! Established in 2008 by Norwegian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist Fred Kavli, Kavli Prizes recognize innovative research in astrophysics, nan...
‘Women in Science’ Series Tackles Sexism, Other Issues
The MGH Martinos Center’s first-ever “Women in Science” seminar series, held this spring, brought together investigators, staff and others from throughout the community for a host of important and thought-provoking discussions. The series proved so successful the organizers are planning to hold a...
Study Identifies Signs of Repeated Blast-Related Brain Injury in Active-Duty United States Special Operations Forces
United States (US) Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel are frequently exposed to explosive blasts during training and combat. However, the effects of repeated blast exposure on the brain health of SOF personnel are unclear, and there is currently no diagnostic test that can detect brain inj...
The (Totally True) Legend of Thomas Witzel and the Ultrahigh-field MRI Quench
Sometimes we get the hero we need. In the summer of 2017, the 7T MRI scanner at the MGH Martinos Center suffered a quench: a sudden loss of superconductivity resulting in a complete loss of the scanner’s magnetic field. In short, it broke. Without a magnetic field, the instrument was inoperabl...
AMA @ Martinos: Jon Polimeni
On Thursday, June 23, the Martinos Center's Jon Polimeni will deliver a keynote lecture at the 2022 meeting of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) in Glasgow, Scotland. In advance of the lecture, Jon is an all-around fascinating guy, so we were thrilled when he agreed to submit to an "...
Chongzhao Ran
Chongzhao Ran, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He received a Master's degree in medicinal chemistry from China Pharmaceutical University and a PhD in medicinal chemistry from Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Industry, C...
White Matter Changes Could Predict Cognitive Decline in Alzheimer’s Disease
Alzheimer’s disease is diagnosed based on abnormal pathology of two proteins in the brain: amyloid and tau. Research suggests, however, that other factors may also play a role. In a paper published online this week in the journal Neurology, a team of investigators at the Athinoula A. Martinos Cen...
Visualizing the Mind: How We See the Brain Through Functional MRI
Last year, Harvard College senior Kelsey Ichikawa (shown in the photo above) interviewed the Martinos Center’s Bruce Rosen and Bruce Fischl for a general audience article about functional MRI, which she was writing for a science journalism course. Earlier this year, the article won the Harvard Bo...
The Past, Present and Future of Molecular Imaging @ Martinos
Over the past several months, the MGH Martinos Center has been both celebrating the past and looking toward the future of its molecular imaging effort – with a symposium held last fall and now a series of initiatives designed to bolster the molecular imaging community. While there has always b...
Estimating Tumor Boundaries in Cancer Surgery With Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging
Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, with an estimated 1,762,450 new cases diagnosed and 606,880 deaths in 2019 alone. While important advances have been made in the development of treatments for cancer, including surgery, a number of challenges remain. Not least: sur...
20 Years of FreeSurfer
It’s a sunny day in Southern California and the developers of FreeSurfer—a suite of software tools for the analysis of neuroimaging data—are preparing for a training session to introduce scientists to the many benefits of the package. To help the scientists find the classroom they have hung “Free...
Ultrahigh-field MRI Tracks Development of Cortical Lesions in Multiple Sclerosis Patients
The development of lesions in the brain’s cortical gray matter is a strong predictor of neurological disability for people with multiple sclerosis (MS), according to a study reported today in the journal Radiology. The findings suggest a role for ultrahigh-field MRI in monitoring the progression ...
The Secret Lives of Martinos Folk: Jake Calkins on vintage guitar amplifiers and peering into the past
Science and music may seem like entirely different disciplines, sitting on opposite sides of a dichotomy that divides the world into two types of people: left brain / right brain, logical / intuitive, and so on. But in fact, they are more similar than one might think (as are the people who practi...
Deep Learning Offers Quantitative Means of Monitoring Disease Progression in Retinopathy of Prematurity
Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is an eye disorder affecting roughly two-thirds of premature infants weighing less than 250 g at birth and one of the leading causes of childhood blindness worldwide. Historically, clinical diagnosis of ROP has been subjective, resulting in considerable variabilit...