The Road to MPI Functional MRI has proved a transformative technology, yielding previously unimaginable insights into the workings of the brain. But what if there were another approach, one with dramatically higher sensitivity, that could shed even more light on these mysteries? What might we learn then? Larry Wald aims to find out.
Members of the MPI group in 2018: Erica Mason, Clarissa Cooley, Larry Wald, Emiri Mandeville and Joe Mandeville. Photo by Caroline Magnain.
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In late 2017, Wald, the director of the Magnetic Resonance Physics & Instrumentation Group in the Martinos Center, was awarded a grant through the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) that will support design and construction of a magnetic particle imaging (MPI) scanner for imaging of the human
brain. Once completed and validated, the technology will offer an exciting new means to study activity in the brain. Ultimately, it could replace fMRI as the premier functional neuroimaging tool. Magnetic particle imaging is not entirely unlike magnetic resonance imaging. Introduced a little more than a decade ago, it uses many of the same principles and shares many of the same technologies as the latter imaging modality. MPI differs in one crucial way, though: it directly detects the magnetization of nanoparticles injected into the body, rather than relying on secondary effects of magnetic resonance relaxation times. Directly imaging the source of contrast like this is what allows for the vastly improved sensitivity.
