Martinos Imaging Center at MIT
The Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center, directed by John Gabrieli, is a state-of-the-art brain imaging facility that serves the biomedical research community at MIT and throughout the Boston area. A joint project of the McGovern Institute and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, the center also has a close relationship to the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown. The Martinos Imaging Center at MIT is made possible through major gifts from Patrick and Lore McGovern and from the Martinos family of Athens, Greece.
Currently the center has two magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners and systems for electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). For more information visit the official Martinos Imaging Center website>>
Watching the brain in action
The development of powerful new imaging methods has transformed neuroscience over the past two decades. Thanks to these remarkable advances, we can now watch the human brain in action as volunteer subjects perform tasks involving language, emotion, memory, even self-reflection -- allowing us to see with extreme precision which parts of the brain underlie these different aspects of our mental lives.
In addition to revealing normal brain function, neuroimaging is providing new views of brain disease. It allows us to see, for example, how the brain's memory systems are affected by Alzheimer's disease; how emotional responses are altered in depression; or how language processing is affected in people with dyslexia. Through studies such as these, we are gaining new insights into the causes of disease as well as new ways to monitor the effectiveness of potential treatments.As neuroimaging technology continues to evolve, we can watch patterns of brain activity with more and more precision. One exciting recent advance is the ability to scan the brains of young children. This opens new doors to understanding how the human brain develops during childhood, how our cognitive abilities emerge over time, and how the normal working of the brain goes awry in developmental disorders such as dyslexia or autism. To learn more about our work with children, read the Spring 2009 issue of Brain Scan.
Learn more about brain imaging>>
New frontiers
In addition to its MRI capabilities, the Martinos Imaging Center has also acquired a system for electroencephalography (EEG), a technology for monitoring the brain's electrical activity through scalp electrodes. EEG has advantages complementary to those of fMRI -- it provides more detail about the timing of electrical activity within the brain.
The imaging center has recently added magnetoencephalography (MEG) to its suite of neuroimaging technologies. MEG is a safe and noninvasive technique for measuring neuronal activity in the human brain. Using magnetic sensors surrounding the head, MEG records the weak magnetic fields generated by active neurons. The temporal resolution of MEG is in the millisecond range, the timescale at which neurons communicate, and is therefore complementary to the institute’s existing MRI-based imaging technologies. It is particularly fitting that a MEG scanner should be at MIT, since the MEG technology was pioneered by David Cohen in the 1970s while he was a member of MIT’s Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory.
The new MEG scanner, an Elekta Triux with 306 channels plus 128 channels for EEG, is housed in a 3-layer shielded room with active compensation coils to reduce magnetic background noise.
Dimitrios Pantazis, who joined the McGovern Institute in 2010, is responsible for the operation of the new MEG laboratory, including training new users and advising on all aspects of MEG technology.
Participate in a study at the Martinos Imaging Center>>
| Images courtesy Patricia O'Loughlin / MIT, Christina Triantafyllou / MIT |
