Seeing the Light with Optical Imaging Technologies It’s late August 2020, the tail end of a long, fraught summer, and David Boas is watching flames dance around the edges of the logs stacked in a fire pit on his patio. Boas, a pioneer in the field of near-infrared spectroscopy and other optical imaging techniques, is musing over a question about what originally brought him to the Martinos Center in the late 1990s. Finally, he looks up from the flames and, in his quiet, deliberate way, starts to tell the story. This history of the Optics group at the Martinos Center dates back to 1998, when Boas was a young researcher and faculty member in the Tufts University Department of Biomedical Engineering. During his graduate work in the early 1990s, he had pioneered the technology near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which can noninvasively measure oxygen levels in tissue, and he was now developing the technology further for biomedical applications—including building one of the first-ever functional NIRS devices for monitoring brain activity. At the same time, some five miles down the road in Charlestown, Martinos Center director Bruce Rosen was looking to validate the still-emerging functional MRI by comparing its results with those from other, related technologies. He learned of Boas’ work and, after meeting with him and discussing the possibilities in working with near-infrared spectroscopy, invited him to join the Center’s ranks.
76
Below: The Center’s David Boas and Anders Dale on a ferry to the Greek island of Mykonos during a 2002 meeting in Athens. Opposite: Measuring activity in the brain with an early near-infrared spectroscopy system, 2002
