The Foundations of Functional MRI When the Martinos Center moved in to Building 149 in the Charlestown Navy Yard, it had a single MRI scanner for human studies: a recently purchased 1.5T system made by GE, which, as a company, was rapidly establishing a foothold in the MRI sphere. (The Center’s first FDA-approved clinical system, acquired in 1984, was made by Technicare, a company owned by Johnson & Johnson. When GE bought Technicare a couple of years later, “we kind of switched our corporate allegiance,” Center director Bruce Rosen says.) Though the Center had only the one system at the time, Radiology chief James Thrall pushed for construction of three scanner bays in the Navy Yard, believing the group would soon outgrow a single bay there. While this would require a significant investment, Thrall argued that the facility would ultimately recover the funds by creating a self-liquidating cost center, in which time spent on the scanner would be charged to research grants held by Center investigators and other, outside users—a model still in use today. The bet would soon pay off. Not long after the move, the Center acquired an MRI scanner with “echoplanar imaging” capabilities made by Advanced NMR Systems—the company started by Ian Pykett, Rosen’s former thesis advisor, after he left Mass General. The scanner installed in the Center was the first-ever clinical system with such capabilities. Echoplanar imaging offered greatly reduced acquisition times with MRI, on the order of milliseconds, and thus enabled a host of new applications with the modality. Not least: Rosen and the Center’s Jack Belliveau used it to characterize a phenomenon that Rosen and his postdoctoral fellow Arno Villringer had both observed with MRI after injection of a contrast agent: a rapid initial
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